[Shootout-list] Selection of Languages

[Brent Fulgham]

--- Isaac Gouy <igouy2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Einar Karttunen <ekarttun at cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:
> > * How common the language is?
> > This is fairly trivial.
> 
> And is "how common" a positive or negative? :-)
> 
> iirc Brent's intention in reviving the Shootout was
> to draw attention to less well known languages (aka 
> Scheme). I share that motivation, and that's why
I've
> worked on Clean and Smalltalk and Oberon programs. 

Part of the problem is that I'm not really clear of
the goals myself.  I initially revived the shootout
so I could see how the Schemes and Haskells of the
world were stacking up against the old mainstays C
and C++ in terms of performance.  Consequently, I
loaded it up with lots of Schemes, Lisps, MLs, etc.,
and only had GCC and GCJ.

Eventually, I was convinced to include commercial
compilers (such as the Intel C/C++ and Fortran
compilers, and the SUN Java implementation), which I
think are useful for comparison.

At root, I think the shootout is really useful for
quickly seeing how a given language compares with
more mainstream options.  Consequently, it is a bit
heavily weighted towards the more obscure languages
(since I don't want to write C++ at home after doing
it at work all day!)

> You'll find several Feature Requests for languages,
> with assurances that programs will be written and 
> sent real soon now... 
> 
> (Apologies to the Groovy guys who actually have sent
> a good number of programs).

And apologies to everyone from me for not being able
to run the shootout for the last few weeks.  My
construction should be complete by September 1, and
the new wiring should be done in the next few days,
so I should be able to get a run in sometime in the
next week or so.  (Of course, Isaac has heard this
before ;-)
 

> > Same for four Scheme implementations. It would be
> > nice if the language folks could pick up just a
> > few implementations to the main page...
> 
> We already did that, and there were complaints.
> We may do that again, and I'm sure there'll be more
> complaints ;-) 

Yes.  Every time we take something off the main page
(or try to pare things down to just a few
representative
copies of a language, such as Java) I get empassioned
pleas for the language to be added back (or for one
implementation versus another to be used as the
representative).  It's a no-win situation.
 
> > Personally I would rather see Scala, Io and maybe
> > even Felix than yet another Java implementation 
> > added to the main page.

I agree.  Isaac has argued strongly (and convincingly)
that we need to limit the main page to reduce clutter
and make it possible for people to find what they
need.  Obviously, this is not ideal since it means
limiting the number shown on the main page.

But I'm afraid I don't know how to resolve this to
everyone's satisfaction.  No matter what we do,
someone will be unhappy.

-Brent