On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 11:47:05AM -0800, Dave Dyer wrote:
> I disagree with almost everything Donn wrote.
>
> Thanks to Moore's law, it is somewhere between unusual and rare for
> the execution "speed penalty" of the language to matter, and if it
> matters today (some but not all languages are fast enough), it won't
> matter when the program is finished.
>
> Thought experiment: 5 years ago, C was "fast enough" but java with
> a 50% speed penalty was "too slow", then today both are "fast enough".
But what is "fast enough"? I'd say that for pretty much all the
algorithms in computer go, there is no "fast enough" - the more time you
have and the faster they are, the more iterations they can make and the
better and further ahead can they read. Be it MonteCarlo playouts or
patterns matched and semeai move candidates tried.
So the point is, yes, the hypothetical Java program can be now as strong
as the C program 5 years ago, but the C program will _now_ be twice as
strong as before, too! (Well, usually the strength increase isn't quite
that linear, but enough so that the point can be made.)
--
Petr "Pasky" Baudis
We don't know who it was that discovered water, but we're pretty sure
that it wasn't a fish. -- Marshall McLuhan
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