[Edu-sig] The Great Computer Language Shootout

[Roman Suzi]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2001, L. Humbert wrote:

>Hi,
>
>after all it's worth to take a look at:
>http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/
>
>There you'll find a benchmark comparison of a number of programming
>languages, done by
>Doug Bagley
>
>Yes, Python is mentioned and compared there, too.
>
>python:
>ackermann ary ary2 echo except fibo hash hash2
>heapsort lists matrix methcall moments nestedloop
>objinst prodcons random regexmatch reversefile sieve
>spellcheck strcat sumcol wc wordfreq
>
>All the source code is included (;-

My observations are :

1. Programs were optimized for speed of execution,
not size
2. ocaml is very promising language:
- usually it's preformance is compared to c/c++
but it uses much less lines of code
3. Python usually is slower than Java and
is in the same category as Ruby, Tcl, ...
(and Perl for non-text tasks)
4. Java programs sizes are times larger than
those of Python
5. Python is less gibberish than most of languages ;-)
while not the most compact.
6. There were no APL in the contest to compete in
code size category ;-)

Seriously, Python doesn't shine according to
this comparison :-(
I expected it to be ahead of Java in most categories,
expecially IO-related ones...

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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