Typing system vs. Java

[Christopher Barber]

anamax at earthlink.net (Andy Freeman) writes:

> Besides, the compute-intensive part of 3D games has already migrated to
> near-hardware.   There's still some mechanics/lighting that Python
> can't quite do in real-time, but Moore's law will cure that fairly soon.

That remains to be seen.  Of course, Moore's law is not actually a law and it
really only describes the amount of transisters that you can fit in a given
area of silicon.  That only indirectly translates into faster program
execution.

> At that point, the only C "required" will be doing format conversions
> (because python's internal representations are unlikely to match what
> the display processor demands).
> 
> > applications, but it is ridiculous to say that there aren't a significant
> > number of applications for which it does not have the required performance.
> 
> The only significant application is the one that you're working on.

Sure, I was just responding to the claim that there are only five applications
that need better performance.  That is silly.  It might well be that the types
of applications that the existing Python community are involved in don't need
anything better than what Python provides.
 
> However, if you think that you're forced to C for performance and the
> application is big enough to take six or more months to write in C, you
> might find that you're better off taking half that time off and then
> writing in Python because Python will be faster then.

Yes, but why would you pick C?  Maybe you would be better off doing the whole
project in Eiffel, for example.

> In a Moore's Law world, trading increased development time for increased
> performance has generally been a loser.

I agree in general, but you still have to satisfy your project requirements.
There is no point in building a system that cannot be scaled to meet your
needs unless you really are only considering it a prototype.  Unfortunately,
all too often management cannot tell the difference between a prototype and
the real thing. ;-)

> That's how C (mostly) killed assembler.  That's how relational
> databases won.  Java is trying to ride the same trend.

Actually, I don't think that processor speedup made much of a difference in
the success of any of these technologies.

- Christopher