On 5/16/12 3:57 PM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
Comparing languages is a highly non-trivial matter involving various
disciplines (including various squidgy ones) and rarely makes sense
without a very specific context for comparison.
Exactly. That's what I was trying to get at re the problems of comparing
Haskell to C++ (or indeed any pair of dissimilar languages). A
legitimate comparison will involve far more than microbenchmarks, but
then a legitimate comparison must always have a specific focus and
context in order to be able to say anything interesting. The problems I
see in language comparisons is that by and large they tend not to have
any such focus[1], and consequently they shed little light on how the
languages compare and shed a bit of darkness by serving only to confirm
initial biases.
[1] A nice counter-example to this trend are papers like:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/modules-classes.pdf
There was another one comparing the expressivity of Java-style
polymorphism vs Haskell-style polymorphism, based on an analysis of
in-the-wild code; but I can't seem to pull it up at the moment.
--
Live well,
~wren
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