| > worth exploring in exactly what ways that is or isn't useful information Now consider how you could use the varying performance on different tasks, and the varying performance on the same task of programs written in the same programming language, as examples (as a resource) for exploring (and showing to others) in what ways you think that is or isn't useful information. If we just consider those "Which programming language is the fastest?" pages, then I think - simply getting someone to look away from a single number ranking (the median) and notice that for some language implementations the performance range is relatively small but for others the range is enormous - is useful. > I'd also question exactly how useful reading toy benchmark solution code is to real problems. Someone's told me that n-body pretty much is what they get paid to work on. Someone's told me that k-nucleotide and reverse-complement are pretty much is what they get paid to work on. The question as usual is who's "real" problems? > wouldn't I be better off looking for samples of readable code that solve problems related to my specific problem domain? Perhaps - and yet for some people what they see in those tiny tiny programs will be enough for a personal opinion about whether X is "the most human-readable". |
Given that this sounds like its your own project, I have a vague idea that you might find interesting: Is there a way to present the results in an additional way which is framed initially as "look at the different ways to solve subproblem X" rather than "look at the graph of performance differences"? It could be an interesting approach to have an alternative additional interface that makes browsing the sample code (maybe with annotations?) front and centre, with a focus on programming techniques as a major differentiator, with scores as an adjunct. At present the visitor is encouraged to start from benchmark scores (either for everything, for a problem, or for a language) and from there move to source code later, but there might be a way to frame it as "let me flip through solutions to problems like X and tag the ones I like the look of, then let's see how they performed"
It's a pretty vague idea, and I don't have much of a handle on how it'd work from a UI perspective, but its seems like it might head off some of the kneejerk responses you get from kneejerkers like me ;), plus it could help encourage some of the uses you're describing in your post.