Monday, June 1, 2009
Charting languages
Guillaume Marceau, who made a guest post here on how to make comparison charts, has an excellent demonstration of this technique over on his blog, charting performance against code verbosity in programming languages:
The speed, size and dependability of programming languages
If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let’s call them system languages. The elegantly concise but sluggish languages would cluster at the bottom right. Let’s call them script languages. On the top right you would find the obsolete languages. That is, languages which have since been outclassed by newer languages, unless they offer some quirky attraction that is not captured by the data here. And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use.