TC wrote:
> Besides, I am a veteran from those days, too. Drawing my first sine-curve on 
> a CRT took a really long time, 10 minutes or so.

He too. Altho I never did much graphics on the TRS-80, I do remember letting 
Mandelbrots run overnight on my Amiga. (Or was that still the Atari at that 
point? I don't even remember.)  Whatever, it was pretty amazing at the time. :-)

> Things did speed up a bit since those days. ;-)

And that is indeed the point of the article.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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nemesis wrote:
> In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
> previous one.  As it is, without context, it FAILS.

Actually, the problem is that you're *guessing* he's comparing languages 
without taking into account the difference in hardware speed. In other 
words, you're providing the *wrong* context by reading into the article 
comparisons that aren't there, then getting complaining when the context you 
invented doesn't match the actual context that you *didn't* read. Kind of 
silly, really. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
> > In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
> > previous one.  As it is, without context, it FAILS.
>
> Actually, the problem is that you're *guessing* he's comparing languages
> without taking into account the difference in hardware speed.

"If the Atari BASIC program ran a thousand times, it would finish after 324,000
seconds or 5400 minutes or almost four days. That means the Python version
is--get ready for this--108,000 times faster than the Atari BASIC code."

This is not guessing.  This *is* a silly comparison, that's all, either being
the point of the article or not.

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nemesis wrote:
> This is not guessing.  This *is* a silly comparison,

Huh. OK.  I don't find it a silly comparison at all, unless you fixate on 
the words "BASIC" and "Python" rather than on "Atari" and "Code I just wrote."

I'll keep on being impressed by the speed of advances in science and 
technology. Feel free to take it all for granted and feel it's silly to be 
impressed thereby. Your loss.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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andrel wrote:

> On 14-11-2009 19:11, nemesis wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
>> 
>> I know that guy, he's from the lambda-the-ultimate web forums. :)  He
>> also mentions magnificent Infocom implementor Brian Moriarty of Trinity's
>> fame, so that's 10 geek points to him.
>> 
>> While he does put the python version to run 1000x over the Basic version,
>> he
>> doesn't acknowledge the difference between 1984 hardware and, say, a P4. 
>> Yes, undoubtedly any interpreted language nowadays is faster than old,
>> line-by-line
>> intepreted Basic, but I guess not by the insane numbers he purports.  Put
>> that qbasic to run that program on the same hardware as Python and let's
>> talk... 5 points taken. :)
>> 
> 
> He was specifically comparing it with his (ours I am afraid) experience
> with 8 bit hardware at *that* time. So you can not take points away for
> that.

Yes, subjectively I think you can appreciate the difference even more. 
Objectively there may be a few defensible arguments that it actually is "not 
that fast".

Oh those days! I still remember thinking "64kb? Who on earth could need 
more!" - a la Bill Gates - and that was when I got my first IBM PC (my Apple 
][ had 16kb at the start, and 48kb later...!)
-- 
Stefan Viljoen

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On 15-11-2009 5:38, nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
>>> previous one.  As it is, without context, it FAILS.
>> Actually, the problem is that you're *guessing* he's comparing languages
>> without taking into account the difference in hardware speed.
> 
> "If the Atari BASIC program ran a thousand times, it would finish after 324,000
> seconds or 5400 minutes or almost four days. That means the Python version
> is--get ready for this--108,000 times faster than the Atari BASIC code."
> 
> This is not guessing.  This *is* a silly comparison, that's all, either being
> the point of the article or not.
> 

I don't think it is. The point is that people complain about something 
being 'slow' while it is more than 5 magnitudes faster than something 
that was not considered slow in it's time. This article is not about 
software or hardware but about human perception.

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On 15-11-2009 1:02, Darren New wrote:
> It's not a language shoot-out. It's saying "this is what 30 years of 
> progress brings, 

I didn't do the maths. Now I am feeling really old again, thanks Darren.

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On 15-11-2009 2:49, TC wrote:
> Well, I do not know how old you are, but everything was SLOW back then. Even 
> accessing memory locations using peek and poke did take some time.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
> 
> Now, all this is almost 30 years past. Maybe I misremember the time it took, 
> but I doubt it.

What I remember is that I was happy that it did it at all. Can't 
remember being frustrated by the speed. More a challenge than a frustration.

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>> Now, all this is almost 30 years past. Maybe I misremember the time it 
>> took, but I doubt it.
>
> What I remember is that I was happy that it did it at all. Can't remember 
> being frustrated by the speed. More a challenge than a frustration.



Of course! You are perfectly right. I was just comparing the past to the 
modern times.



And although, with hindsight and compared to modern computers was terrible 
slow, at the time it was new and terrible fast. I remember the times of the 
slide-rule - compared to using a slide-rule a VIC was a racehorse. It even 
had 5x more memory than the eagle which landed on the moon. Those were the 
very first days on personal computing and even a pocket calculator was a 
new, expensive and exciting device.



I remember buying a 16k expansion for my VIC at a price (allowing for 
inflation) you can buy a quad core today. Then came graphics cards on the 
IBM PC - high-res in black and white. And everybody loved it. At the VIC's 
time this kind of graphics was better than the one a really expensive PC 
could deliver.



At one time or the other I did own or use most types of personal computers: 
owned a VIC, a C64, an Amiga, used Atari and IBM PC at university. PC-AT, 
PC-XT, PS2 - the whole palette. Never owned a partially-eaten fruit, though. 
;-)

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TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> Well, I do not know how old you are, but everything was SLOW back then.

  I don't think a computer has ever existed where plotting n pixels, where
n is the width of the screen, takes 10 minutes (well, at least if we are
talking about computers which had a TV/monitor screen output). I would be
surprised if it took even 10 seconds in any such computer, even if you were
to plot *all* the pixels on screen individually (not just one pixel per
column).

  After all, these computers were used for playing games, editing text,
programming and so on. They would be completely *unusable* if it took
minutes to draw a screenful.

  Calculating a sine wave might take some time in a really old computer,
but still nowhere near 10 minutes. 10 seconds I could believe with a 70's
computer. Maybe.

> Even 
> accessing memory locations using peek and poke did take some time.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20

  This computer was used to play games. Are you telling me it took 10 minutes
to update each frame? Or even 10 seconds?

  I bet the framerate was probably more along the lines of 10 frames/s, if
not even faster.

  (Yes, I know that in many old computers and game consoles drawing one
single pixel was much slower than drawing a hardware-supported sprite, but
I am still unwilling to believe the 10-minute claim. Even 10 seconds sounds
absurd, even if you are filling the entire screen.)

> Back then you tried everything to increase speed. Instead of dividing by pi 
> you manually computed 1/pi and used this as a factor (muliplication was way 
> faster than division), instead of using x^2 you used x*x (faster ;-), I 
> think you get the picture. But if you did not experience this first hand, 
> you will not believe it.

  I think that it's you who is far, far off. You make it sound that those
old processors supported floating point numbers or even multiplication in
the first place. Most of the old CPUs back then (eg. the Zilog Z80, which
was rather popular and used in many home computers) didn't support even
integer multiplication, much less floating point.

  But even if you had to perform integer multiplication in software, it
would still not have taken anywhere in the range of minutes to fill up
a screen of pixels (unless calculating each pixel was heavy; eg. drawing
the Mandelbrot set back then could take hours, but not because it was slow
to draw, but because it's immensely slow to calculate).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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