The “C is Efficient” Language Fallacy

“[...] It’s a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They’re not. They’re good at things that need to get very close to the hardware – not in the efficiency sense, but in the sense of needing to be able to fairly directly munge the stack, address specific hardware registers, etc. But they are dreadful languages for writing real scientific and/or numerical code. [...]“

From: Good Math, Bad Math

In summary: C is for bit twiddling, OCaml kicks its ass for real numerical work, and all the scientists are still using Fortran where performance *really* matters, anyway.

Of course this is as of two years ago, I’d like to see how Haskell and compiled Erlang stack up now, and maybe Stalin (a Scheme -> C compiler). And while we’re at it, let’s be fair to C and try LLVM or Intel’s C compiler instead of GCC. Regardless though, all of his points seem to stand that there’s still loads of optimizations that simply cannot be done for C, which will always leave it behind as far as raw on the metal performance is concerned.

Gun control is using both hands.

Came across an interesting page w.r.t. firearms.

” [...] Since I was suspicious of the Handgun Control Inc. statistics that everyone quotes, I decided to do my own research. Here’s what I found. I welcome corrections and reliable sources of more recent statistics.

“Out of 30,708 Americans who died by gunfire in 1998, only 316 were shot in justifiable homicides by private citizens with firearms.” -Handgun Control, Inc.

Let’s break that number down. [...]“

Which subsequently falls entirely apart under even the most basic of analysis. From: http://seanbonner.vox.com/library/post/grigsby-why-im-no-longer-antigun.html

Which reminds me of another short post I had seen before regarding firearm permits and gun crime and shows quite literally, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”:
http://mcgonigle.us/bill/blog/articles/2008/03/21/gun-crime-statistics

Of course mention must also be made of the eternal classic, How to Lie with Statistics (which is still for sale).

Statistics are the new propaganda for everything ranging from politics to science. Think about it. Are there any beliefs you hold that may be based in large part upon misrepresented “statistics”? Ever bothered to research their data yourself?

Is the Web the new BASIC?

“Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”… hundreds of thousands of geeks first got into computing by learning BASIC (or something similar) on their computers. Commodores, Amigas, Altairs, etc…

You don’t really hear of that anymore. It seems to be the trend that with the rampant popularity of the Web, instead of learning BASIC or something similar and working their way up to more traditional (i.e., not designed specifically for noobs) languages, people are getting their first taste of design by learning HTML and CSS and moving on to things like AJAX or PHP. They’re not learning to write clever programs to make their *computer* do new things, they’re writing web apps to make the *Web* do new things.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? One obvious point of failure is that HTML and CSS are not programming languages as they’re nowhere near Turing complete, and really teach nothing more than a form of typesetting (though I’m sure Knuth would appreciate the return of the popularity in general of the separation of content (HTML/XML) from presentation (CSS)). But then again, JavaScript, the “J” in “AJAX”, certainly *is* a proper programming language by anyone’s standards, it just happens to have a very specific problem domain like Erlang or raw assembly… or BASIC. Not to mention PHP, ASP, and all the other web scripting languages.

And with on/offline web apps becoming so popular (look at Google, or Facebook, and this whole “Web 2.0″ craze in general for obvious examples, not to mention WordPress), has anything really changed, other than instead of learning to program computers, the new breed learns to program the Web?

Just a thought.