On 18/06/2004, Andr� Pang wrote:
Yeah. Language shootouts are nearly worthless. (And I say that as an experienced Haskell programmer who uses and loves Objective-C and Perl for his day job, which are rather different beasts to Haskell.) I groaned when I heard that the shootout was revived, because I didn't think they'd improve on the "benchmarks" used to test the various languages, and they haven't. I can't really be bothered emailing them about the fallacies involved because it's just too tedious to explain, and I'm sure they're convinced they're doing a good deed to the world.
Your contempt for disclaimers was so convincing that we removed them all. We kept what was always true: "Our goals are to learn about new languages, compare them in various (possibly meaningless) ways and, most importantly, have some fun!" If you can't be bothered helping to improve the "benchmarks" whine as much as you like - it's cheap and it changes nothing. Or think of a good 'lookup' benchmark that makes some sense for both functional and imperative languages (the 'hashtable' benchmark is too bad).
About the only good they serve is to show programmers that there are other languages out there, which some people may like to explore. ("Oooo, what's this O'Caml language? Seems to be doing OK in the speed tests ...")
Yes, name recognition is important - which is why the website now shows language names, not just language implementation names.
They're also good for compiler implementors to find pathological speed cases in their compiler. That's about it.
I've been pleasantly surprised that the simplistic performance measurements on the Shootout have been enough to motivate implementation improvements. That's a pretty cool outcome. -snip- __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com