On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Anthony Dardis <adar...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 29 Dec 2010 04:32:44 -0500, Herbert Thoma > <herbert.th...@iis.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > >> On 28.12.2010 22:35, Christian Stimming wrote: >>> >>> Am Dienstag, 28. Dezember 2010 schrieb Jeff Warnica: > > <snip> > >> I am not that sure that an interpreted language is a good idea. But I am >> an electrical engineer not a computer scientist. So I tend to prefer >> languages that are closer to the hardware ... >> >> Herbert. >> > > My recent programming experience is a lot of little number-theory puzzles > from the Euler Project, 40 or 50 in Python, the last 10 or so in c. I have > something of the same feeling of wanting to be close to the metal. But I > have to say that Python is a real joy. It is syntactically beautiful. It is > semantically amazingly powerful: all those basic data structure types > (lists, trees, ...) are mostly transparently available (for example: I'm > pretty sure that the set type is implemented as a balanced tree, since > random access is incredibly fast even for sets with millions of members). > Since it encourages functional style programming, it's possible to write > astonishingly elegant code. (Of course, it's also possible not to, but that > goes without saying.) For computation, Python is really really fast: agreed, > the programs I've tried run about 10 times faster in c than in Python, but > on modern hardware we're still talking hundreds of milliseconds. For > GnuCash, computation speed is irrelevant. The GUI will be handled by GTK (or > whatever). > > And coding a solution in Python, I suspect, is always going to be a lot > faster than in c, assuming equivalent levels of experience in both.
Amen to everything you've said here. And coding in Python is going to be faster than c++ as well. And finding people who can write good Python is always going to be an easier task than c or c++. Another issue is readability. I would assert that it is far easier to read and understand someone else's Python than someone else's c++, especially a factor in a volunteer project like this one, where people can wander off without jeopardizing their paycheck. /Don > > Tony > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-devel mailing list > gnucash-devel@gnucash.org > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel > _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel