Comments on: Never mind the language, the programmer is what matters

By: Emilio Wuerges

Emilio Wuerges — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:34:23 +0000

My guess is that it is a matter of culture surrounding the programmers.
Perl programmers often follow mailing lists where people post their problems and solutions. They often have a close solution to recur to, before starting from a totally new Idea. I don’t know about TCL, thought.

By: Chris Blanc

Chris Blanc — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:35:41 +0000

Perl is a general purpose language that excels at common tasks based on file systems, text processing, and any kind of data conformity or fixing task. With its built in regular expression powerhouse, it lends itself to the kind of thinking that produces quick and reliable solutions. As a result, it reminds me of other “glue” languages like Microsoft BASIC on 1980s computers and HyperCard on the Mac. I feel naked using a machine that does not have it installed.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:30:10 +0000

For the 0.001% of readers who *didn’t* get here through Reddit, there is also a lively discussion about this article here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9luae/never_mind_the_language_the_programmer_is_what/

By: admin

admin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:55:43 +0000

DeGisi and JGM, your suggestion that this is caused by some particularly helpful implementation in Perl + Tcl is probably correct. I haven’t looked at the exact task, but a dictionary task sounds like a simple hash-implentation in Perl to me.

But does that invalidate the data? Not at all, actually it is probably getting us closer to the bigger picture: The more common, important or useful tasks are made a part of the programming language the less it relies on the programmer to get it right. The Java,C++ and C-coders might all have had to rely on creating their own hashing algorithm while the Perl-coders could just use the hash algorithm built-into and optimized in Perl.

That might be the reason for the lower variability, but it doesn’t make the observation more trivial. Rather it indicates that you might want to look at a higher-level language even for perfomance-demanding tasks, if it has built-in support for it, since statistics predict you might not be able to re-implement the algorithm in a better way anyways.

Not exactly new thoughts, I guess… It’s just that they got some real observations of this that is cool.

By: JGM

JGM — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:55:25 +0000

Is it possible that PERL has some common library or built in set of functions/objects that perform a core part of the dictionary task requested? I would think that in that case you would see the low variation, as all or most of the submissions would be running identical code.

By: bernz

bernz — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:33:26 +0000

Cool, this suggests that most perl programmers reach an approximately equal (and respectable) level of insanity.

By: Steven Obua

Steven Obua — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:56:49 +0000

Well, you could also argue that the language DOES matter most. In particular, you should only program in TCL or perl.

Of course this is doubtful, just as these kind of experiments are

By: Tom DeGisi

Tom DeGisi — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:24:00 +0000

It might just mean that there is particular implementation for that problem in Perl and TCL which is obvious to to competent programmers in the language.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:45:23 +0000

See: http://www.flownet.com/ron/papers/lisp-java.pdf

for a Lisp version.