[pypy-dev] PyPy 1.1 beta release

[Laura Creighton]

It is also hard for people to process fractional numbers when they are
thinking about speed.  '2 times the speed' feels a lot easier to
understand than '2.1' times the speed.  And once you get to numbers
less than 1, things break down altogether.  If you want to tell me
that something is slower, I don't expect to hear it as 'some number
less than 1' times the speed.  I want a very hard break at the point
0, and for you then to go about telling me how many times slower than
something that something else is.

For most measurements, I would be happy if nobody mentioned the words
'speed', 'faster' and 'slower' at all.  What I am _really_ interested,
is a measurement of time.  And I have a much easier time understanding
time quantities, which I am used to dealing with, than speed quantites
which rarely show up in life.

So while I am always a bit hazy on what 'x times the speed' really means,
when you change this to 'this program runs in half the time, one
quarter of the time, twice the time, or even .8 of the time' I have a
much easier time of it.  I'm used to measuring time, and I expect it to
be linear.  I'm not used to  measuring speed, and I keep worrying
'is this linear'? 'is this logarithmic?' 'is this exponential?'.  It
is only when I get to measure the actual times taken to do some sort
of task, say a benchmark, that I get any real sense of whether a change
seems to be a trivial small improvement, or a colossal major one.

I wonder if others feel the same way.

Laura