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". Note that some programs will always be too slow, so the speed of the program also doesn't matter. A brute force Go program will never be fast enough in any language on any computer. --- For most other programs what matters is the time to develop the program, not the execution speed once developed. That said, current monte carlo programs are in the zone where speed does matter. There are cases where the intrinsic features of a language make a huge difference to a particular strategy, but most modern languages have very similar feature sets, and it's not too likely that unusual language features are a big advantage. Overwhelmingly, two factors govern productivity for something like go programming. (1) the quality of the development environment. (2) the availability of suitable libraries which contain debugged code that will be useful.
_______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
