Python vs. C++ Builder - speed of development

[holger krekel]

Brandon Van Every wrote:
> Andy Freeman wrote:
> > "Brandon Van Every" <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com> wrote in message
> > news:<gID_9.887$ek4.89394 at newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...
> >> Lisp sounds like a bad fit to my current problems.  I'm dealing with
> >> simple geometric relationships, not complicated ones.
> >
> > Then what is taking you so long?
> 
> (1) Designing the mathematical APIs so that the primitives are very easy to
> understand.  (2) My knowledge of certain geometric methods, for instance
> finding Barycentric coordinates on spherical triangles, is limited.  I have
> to put a lot of design time into figuring things out.  (3) My code is
> portable, designed to be agnostic with respect to 3D APIs.  So I've spent a
> lot of time abstracting DirectX out of existence.
> 
> > Or, if you had a lot of simple relationships that were slightly different
> > from one another, both Python and Lisp[1] would let you exploit that
> > similarity without being forced to keep things as C++ simple as possible.
> 
> You have a profoundly different engineering philosophy.  You seem to think
> up-front flexibility is Good.  I think it is Bad.

That's an interesting point.  Actually many of the 'unit tests first,
then the code' crowd might concur with you: only do as much to
get your unit tests pass.  Up-front flexibility can make programs
and APIs difficult to understand.  Simplicity is an important goal [1].

OTOH python allows to easily abstract out functionality into
classes or functions.  So it certainly helps when there is a
need to be more flexible.  In my experience C++ tended to
get more in the way at this stage.

cheers,

    holger


[1] with C++ simplicity is not easy to reach but certainly
    possible.