| The problem is subjective and thus more difficult to provide evidence for. I don't think the parent doubts the runtimes or is claiming that the code for his pet language wasn't written properly and therefore the site is a sham. The issue is: what is reasonable code? Benchmarks invariably become a game of massaging the code to produce the optimal assembly. And that's the problem. The reason that we invented higher level languages was so we could stop thinking about assembly. The point of most higher level languages is not to optimize CPU cycles, but to optimize human brain cycles. If we only cared about speed (and not at all about development time), we would just write all code in assembly. I am not particularly interested in how fast meticulously fine tuned code in a given language runs. I have no doubt that, given enough time, an excellent programmer can finely craft a block of code to run very fast in any half decent language. And this site is evidence of that. What I want to know, and what benchmarks never show, is which languages make writing performant code simple, idiomatic, and natural. Which languages give me good performance, without having to really work for it? This is an amazing site, but it is a stretch to think that it compares languages. It compares programmers and their implementations. The implementations are more like their own art form, like Chess or something. |
We could always take the parent at their word -- "Now i know these are Potemkin-village level stunts and political maneuvering by language activists and staff of that site.".