On 16-Dec-08 22:46, Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> 2. How much slower would the whole contraption be? (I'm guessing it 
>>> would make Vista look *fast*...)
> 
>> It would be about 30% faster.
> 
>   If it would indeed by 30% faster, that would only be a sign that the
> current codebase sucks. (Of course being MS, that would hardly surprise
> anyone.)
> 
>   If the codebase sucks, it means the programmers are incompetent. Would
> a change in programming language make them less incompetent?
> 
A couple of possible answers:
- you take it a bit too serious
- not all programmers are equally competent at every level. A good 
programming system and language can result in a better match for every 
team member.
- C does not provide build in error checking, which means that often 
data is checked both in the calling and the called function even if you 
can simply prove that it will comply to the precondition. That might 
give 30% slowing down in some cases. Of course there are also cases wher 
both end fail to check, assuming that it is a task of the other. That 
result in unreliable code.
- A language comes with a paradigm which enables solving problems in 
certain ways. I am doing things in Matlab that I would not do in C 
because although the languages are similar, some things are a few 
keystrokes in Matlab and 20+ lines of code in C. Just as that some 
things are more easy expressed in sql or prolog or with lex/yacc than in 
C and run faster (even if you could do it in C and even if C was used as 
an intermediate step).

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