recent review of scripting lngs?

[Jeremy Hylton]

The article in question is this one:

http://www.computer.org/computer/co2000/rx023abs.htm

       An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages

       Lutz Prechelt 

       Often heated, debates regarding different programming
       languages' effectiveness remain inconclusive because of scarce
       data and a lack of direct comparisons. The author addresses
       that challenge, comparatively analyzing 80 implementations of
       the phonecode program in seven different languages (C, C++,
       Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl). Further, for each language,
       the author analyzes several separate implementations by
       different programmers. The comparison investigates several
       aspects of each language, including program length, programming
       effort, run-time efficiency, memory consumption, and
       reliability. The author uses comparisons to present insight
       into program language performance. For example, the study
       indicates that Java's memory overhead is still huge compared to
       C or C++, but its runtime efficiency has become quite
       acceptable. The scripting languages, however, offer reasonable
       alternatives to C and C++, even for tasks that must handle fair
       amounts of computation and data.

       Computer, Vol. 33, No. 10, October 2000 

It is based on a technical report that was discussed on the list
several months ago:

http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.ps.gz

Here are two of the significant postive conclusions about Python,
cast in my own words.  It's hard to say how the conclusions
generalize to other programming tasks.  Clearly there are many
programming tasks that are similar to the phonecode program; speech
recognition, on the other hand, probably has very different
requirements. 

The general comparison is between scripting languages (Python, Perl,
Rexx, Tcl) and systems languages (C, C++, Java), although Java is
sometimes considered separately.

- Writing programs in scripting languages is at least twice as fast as
  writing in a systems language.  The resulting programs are half the
  size of their counterparts in systems languages.

- Python and Perl are faster than Tcl.

Take these conclusions with a grain of salt, both because Prechelt
suggests this and because I'm a language bigot posting on Usenet <0.5
wink>.  Read the whole paper.

Jeremy