On Wednesday 29 March 2006 22:01, Craig A. James wrote: > This is off-topic for this group so I'll just give a brief reply; I'm happy > to carry on more just between the two of us... > > Gorshkov wrote: > > That being said ..... what *is* the difference between coding a website - > > major or otherwise - in an "old-fashioned" compiled language and a > > non-compiled language, except for the amount of hoursepower and memory > > you require? > > > > Old-fashioned doesn't mean bad, inappropriate, or inferior. It's just not > > the latest-and-greatest, however it's currently defined by the geek > > fashion police. > > Our experience coding web sites with C/C++ versus Perl is about a factor of > ten in productivity. We only use C/C++ for CPU-intensive calculations, > such as scientific prediction code. Everything else is Perl or Java. > > I recently re-coded 10,000 lines of C into 650 lines of Perl. Why? String > handling, hash tables, and the simplicity of DBD/DBI. And there was no > loss of performance, because the app was strictly I/O bound (that is, > Postgres was I/O bound). Sure, the old app may not have been optimal, but > we're talking about a factor of 15 reduction in lines of code. Sounds to me like the C programmers in your past needed to learn how to re-use code and make libraries. That's not a function of the language - that's a function of the programmer. > > That's not "geek fashion", it's good engineering. Pick the best tool for > the job, and learn how to use it. > Thanks for making my point. You choose the best tool for the job, and sometimes it's "old-fashioned". Please remember that - there may be newbies out there who think that if they're not using the latest alpha-beta-zeta version .0006-a-r1, then they must be bad programmers.
