[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[DR]

Peter Scott wrote:
> 
>> This is why I'm not so much of a fan of "speed" benchmarks which are 
>> usually fairly artificial.  It could just be that Larry Wall (Perl) 
>> and Guido van Rossum (Python) are poor coders.
>>
>> Now if that last statement doesn't start a flame war, nothing will. :p
> 
> Harrumph.  The most important speed benchmark IMHO is how quickly you 
> can get the code working.  That aside, the Perl builtins are coded in 
> hand-optimized C, so they will often work faster than a naive C 
> implementation.  The speed loss is in the transitions between complex 
> opcodes.
> 
>> I must pluck up courage and have another go at learning Perl.  I have 
>> in the past read several chapters of a Perl book but found the 
>> language very arcane and one that delights in obfuscation.
> 
> Sounds like you're reading the wrong books :-)
> 
> The language doesn't delight in obfuscation, some programmers do.  
> There's an obfuscated C contest but people don't accuse C of being 
> obfuscated.  Just because Perl is featured enough to make golfing games 
> [http://perlgolf.sourceforge.net/] fun doesn't mean that behaviour 
> should be sanctioned in maintainable code any more than creative abuse 
> of the C preprocessor [cf: Code Complete, Writing Solid Code].  There 
> are languages that don't lend themselves well to obfuscation, like SQL 
> and COBOL, but how much fun are they?  (Yes, I know about the COBOL 
> Goldilocks program, we got a printout of it in college.)  Then there are 
> languages like JCL that are obfuscated to begin with and were never fun :-)
> 
JCL is not a language it is a mechanism of torture!

Deid