[pypy-dev] PyPy 1.1 beta release

[Steven H. Rogers]

I was able to parse the speed description, though I had to slow down to 
be sure I was capturing the intended meaning.  Perhaps "20 percent 
slower to 100 percent faster" would work better.

# Steve

Laura Creighton wrote:
> 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
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