Re: gEDA-user: Languages etc

[Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 02:10:00PM +0000, Olgierd Eysymontt wrote:
> I think that more powerfull machines have made more easy to many people
> get into the programming world, I'd like to forget machines are
> procedural (easyly done in a some GHz big machine) but of course I
> don't, I learned the old way Basic -> pascal -> C -> C++ -> ......
> ->java -> python ....
> 
> I think we should not care about the power of the machines needed for an
> EDA system as it will always be lower than the power needed by a web
> browser, or do you still pretend to browse in ascii ?

A power needed for selected popular bloatware doesn't mean anything. If
you write application properly, it always runs quickly.

Graphical browser Twibright Links coldstarts in about 300ms on my 1.5GHz
Pentium system as compared to Firefox which coldstarts like 5 seconds.
Estimated 80% of the time is precomputation of 0.75MB of 48-bit
precision dithering tables, which are used to dither all videodata even
on 24-bit colour depth in 48-bit virtual precision including gamma
correction and LCD picture preemphasis (including text), and this time
and L2 cache usage could be reduced to 25% if I had time to rewrite it
to two-level lookup.

I once wrote a program for generating antialiased pictures from
Ghostscript output which used advanced bit operation black magic and was
capable to make 30 megabytes/sec data throughput on fairly obsolete 486
system, fed from the Ghostscript side and downresampling image data 17x
horizontally and 15x vertically.

I once wrote a program for Z80 running on 3.5MHz, 4.5kB big, that played
16kHz 8-bit samples in 7-bit quality on internal 1-bit speaker of
ZX Spectrum.

> 
> Things have changed in the last years, now you can embeed and
> interpreter in you code (I do, I use jython http://www.jython.org/ in 2
> softwares), a database, and many thing more, now you can make software
> many order more complex than before, and that's thanks to better
> languages.
> 
> Parts of one of my projects goes on a PIC microcotroller, programmed in
> plain C and ASM, so I know what's been in both worlds and I can tell you
> Java have many defects, can be more or less propietary, but it's a
> concept by it's own, besides that, there a so many code wroten in Java
> that makes very easy to learn the languaje and do a very good job, same
> as with C or C++, but with 30% the effort.

The time spent by programmer is not important. There are few programmers
and many users. Moreover, programmer emits just little CO2 and water
vapour. CPU factory pollutes environment with a set of nasty chemicals.

That's the point of view from the reality side. You can of course
argument by some monetary arguments, but your reasoning then loses
contact with reality and shift into realm of wishes and illusions.

> Of course, at the end, everything is a matter of taste.

Yes if you stick your tongue into CPU factory's wastewater outlet
you'll feel bitter taste. We can say then that Java has a bitter
taste.

CL<