Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Ruby/Forth challenge for WJ Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 12:36:51 -0800 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 18 Message-ID: <87wprdtdwc.fsf@nightsong.com> References: <35f4686c-f2c4-4ed8-9c46-2238645b9b97@googlegroups.com> <20160113051755.10f38de7@_> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="89fc4f87faf042e7e4d428a3639a51e3"; logging-data="2203"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/mqWtenYXxuhRPXKrJA4pW" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:xU1IYsjtwqgmFAQ43v12t/xeu+o= sha1:OowQ4CnIqE/uLtv4Hmaq6PpSyHY= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:44836 Rod Pemberton writes: > If you're coding applications or an operating system, which I'm > assuming is still the job of most computer programmers, then > speed is far more important. Nah, not really, OS development is a niche, and most application programming these days isn't very speed intensive, primarily because computation is at least 1e6 times cheaper than in the early Unix era (1 mips vax at $100k vs. 10000 mips x86 at $1000. The software development cycle has gotten a lot faster so people can't spend as long tweaking and debugging code. There are some big applications and OS's written in C or C++ but not that many people work on those. Facebook and Wikipedia are written in PHP, Youtube and Yelp are supposedly written in Python, Github is written in Ruby, etc. (Youtube of course depends heavily on ffmpeg or the like, which are written in C, but not considered part of the application proper). Most programmers I know these days, including me, do most of their stuff in scripting languages and quite a few have never used C at all.