Re: C++ religious war (was: llua Higher-level C API for Lua)

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 9:18 AM, Isaac <isaacpei@a1make.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
>> <roberto <at> inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>> > It did not hit a sweet spot. It was born there. (I do not think it would
>> > have much momentum if not for that reason.)
>
>
> hi, regarding go, let me add some flame from a non-professional programmer
> perspective (where it hits a sweet spot):
>
> my level of C is only college course level (never really programed in it
> after college course), and my goto-tools are:
>     python, ruby, lua and R.
>
> Working on tons of research projects, sometimes I'll need to 'aggregate' my
> data, or extract data from different data source. For this, I can use anyone
> in the list; but it turns out ruby's Find.find is 'coded in C', and runs
> faster than in the other 3 by maybe 5 fold at least, with the least memory
> footage:
>     it scans gigs of data files in several minutes (ruby version).
>
> OK, here's go - honest, I don't know how much work it takes to program it in
> C, but in go, all I need is filepath.Walk (only googleing and find some
> source code):
>     ... and scans through gigs of files in about or less than a minute (go
> version).
>
>
> I think lua version might work better than ruby's, but you know, I have to
> dig out lfs, figure out why it didn't work out of box when I installed from
> luarocks on windows ... after finally getting it to work ... a full screen
> of error message stopped me from further exploring this functionality in lua
> ...
>
> ... So from an end user's perspective, 'the worse is better' - actually, it
> is better.
>
>
>

This story of your experience reminded of a talk that I went to on big
data. They said it was impossible to draw direct conclusions from
trends that were "discovered" when analyzing petabytes of data.

They had come to understand that the best approach was to get people
to write out their experience, collect a great number of those
experience, identify trends in those stories and then go back to the
people in charge and say, "Make more stories happen like this and less
stories like that."

Off topic, but I always find peoples actual experience to be much more
engaging and interesting than their feature requests. :)

-Andrew