recent review of scripting lngs?
Jeremy Hylton
jeremy at beopen.com
Fri Oct 13 13:06:20 EDT 2000
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
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