Brian McCallister: Expressiveness Matters, via Keith:
I think most people would agree that algorithm selection matters more than language of implementation for performance. That is what this is. The simple fact is that Justin could get a 20x speed improvement with the ruby based implementation, not because ruby is faster (it definately isn't) but because the language, the framework, and the stack makes it easier to do what he wants to do. The theoretical limit of optimization is definately in J2EE's favor, but if actually doing those optimizations is significantly more difficult (complexity for the most part) -- does it matter if they can be done?
That's my experience exactly. The flexibility and speed of development you get with a language like Python or Ruby give you extra time to spend on choosing good algorithms and data structures that wind you up with not only more flexible or expressive code, but with a faster program as well, even though it's in a higher-level and "slower" language than the alternatives.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
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