[gdg92989]

I have to disagree here. Although I know that the speaker is just trying to have fun with the idea the metaphor is flawed. whereas a Mercedes engine gets more and more powerful and not any more efficient computer processors are getting more efficient by the day. also the "10 to 100 times slower" comment seems like an exaggeration to me. In the end the language you use should be decided by what will give your customers the best software possible and nothing else. Because its not immoral to waste the computers time but it is immoral to waste the users time.

[cassandravoiton]

The page below shows the media peformance of Python (the fastest in these of PHP/Ruby/Python) as 49.73 times slower than the fastest compiled language. The seems pretty much between 10 and 100 to me.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...

 	compare 2	 |-	 |---	 25%	median	 75%	 ---|	 -|

Fortran Intel 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.01 1.35 1.87 7.84 C GNU gcc 1.00 1.00 1.01 1.21 1.55 2.36 4.97 C++ GNU g++ 1.00 1.00 1.10 1.26 1.68 2.28 2.28 ATS 1.00 1.00 1.24 1.45 2.30 3.90 7.24 Ada 2005 GNAT 1.04 1.04 1.22 1.51 1.84 2.76 4.81 Java 7 -server 1.40 1.40 1.59 1.90 2.14 2.97 4.76 Scala 1.38 1.38 1.90 2.76 3.43 5.72 10.21 Haskell GHC 1.53 1.53 2.60 2.80 4.36 7.00 15.15 Go 1.29 1.29 2.12 2.85 6.90 14.08 24.05 C# Mono 1.60 1.60 2.62 3.08 7.12 13.88 14.21 Lisp SBCL 1.12 1.12 1.81 3.40 4.24 7.89 11.20 OCaml 1.18 1.18 1.76 3.75 4.87 9.24 9.24 Pascal Free Pascal 1.53 1.53 2.47 4.37 7.49 15.03 24.20 Clojure 2.02 2.02 3.50 4.99 8.44 14.81 14.81 F# Mono 2.97 2.97 3.16 5.33 8.92 17.57 37.80 Racket 1.22 1.22 5.06 6.86 11.04 19.99 59.08 Erlang HiPE 5.17 5.17 7.99 10.79 15.44 26.61 41.54 Erlang 5.40 5.40 14.20 22.73 30.09 53.91 218.10 Python 3 1.22 1.22 9.25 49.73 68.86 131.37 131.37 PHP 1.90 1.90 10.29 50.17 83.42 193.10 260.90 Ruby 1.9 4.67 4.67 11.74 53.29 101.33 235.71 356.61 Ruby JRuby 5.75 5.75 26.67 58.81 115.06 247.65 266.51 Perl 4.00 4.00 22.61 103.29 126.82 225.35 225.35

[cassandravoiton]

There are plenty of bench marks showing 10 to 100 times is in the ball part. Computers use masses of power because there are so many of them. As they get more efficient, their numbers increase. The benefit of using faster languages is constant irrespective of the efficiency of the machine on which it is running. How can wasting energy be OK? Even if you don't think it has climate change effects, it has economic and energy security effects - non of them good.

[gdg92989]

I wouldn't say its OK to waste energy but you have to put things in perspective. Your first concern should be to save the users time. The less time they have to use the program to achieve their goal means less instructions. Videos like these aren't looking at the bigger picture.

[cassandravoiton]

If code runs faster then the user time is wasted less as well. That seems in alignment with the ideas behind the video.

[gdg92989]

I don't want to hear the "faster programs save the user time too" argument its total BS. the vast majority of CPU time is spent waiting for the user. So while you're on a holy quest maximizing 100,000 instructions down to 1,000, every second that the user wastes dealing with your neglected UI 1,000,000,000 cycles are wasted (and that's on a machine with a single 1ghz processor).

[NerdsCentral]

The post is talking about servers. Most scripting is for code running on servers. Servers do not wait for the user. Your comment has zero merit.

[gdg92989]

no.. your comment and your whole shortsighted video have no merit. Servers spend time waiting for users as well. Whether its waiting for the next HTTP request or the next batch processing job servers wait for people too.