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.