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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

It's true that it's arbitrary; the problem is, there's no non-arbitrary alternative, so it's a weak charge to make.

Unless you're going to allow every language to converge on simply blasting some bytes into RAM and executing optimized machine-language code and watch all the languages cluster to the exact same location give or take how long it takes to load the machine code, you have to draw some lines about what's a "real" implementation and what isn't. If I were running it, I'd be even more strict and insist that the solutions must be "idiomatic"... and what's idiomatic and what isn't would also be arbitrary, because there is no escape from the "arbitrary". Yet the end result is useful. Not totally determinative, but it's not anywhere near "useless" either.

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Combining your comment and DarkShikari's (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404278), it seems like a good shootout should simply compare the simplest, most idiomatic solution possible in each language.

The problem with a comparison of idiomatic solutions is that they rely in different degrees on what's in their libraries. IIRC the shootout tries to avoid this by comparing similar solutions using the same algorithm that are actually implemented with the interpreter/compiler in question. IMHO that's the more sensible way to do this.

Perhaps that concern is eliminated with good test programs? As an extreme example, if I wanted to compare how different languages do array slicing it's meaningless to force python to implement array slicing without the [:] operator. But then this whole test program is meaningless anyway.

You're right that there's a lot of nuance here, and perhaps there's no better solution. It's not even clear to me if there's a meaningful question to be answered. "This ocean's warmer than that one? What part? In summer or winter? Did you measure near a blue whale's fart?"

If that's what you'd like to see then please make the measurements and publish the programs for that comparison!

No I think I'll just sit here and complain ineffectually, but thanks for the suggestion!

I can work on only one thing at a time, but I can complain about many things at once. I think both functions are useful.

I wasn't even aware of this particular problem. Now this thread's taught me (and others) to utterly ignore the shootout. That's useful even if nobody builds a replacement.

What "particular problem"?

That the solutions shown are filtered through an arbitrary set of hoops.

There's nothing arbitrary about wanting a Python program to work with CPython and Python 3.

I don't see how your one-line response is addressing the original article's criticisms, especially in the final paragraph.

I'm also disappointed that you respond to a rebuttal by switching your argument, without acknowledging whether the rebuttal is correct or not. I'm going to stop responding to this thread.

Do you think that final paragraph is somehow The Truth?

>> "It's also not possible to send any messages once your ticket has been marked as closed, meaning to dispute a decision you basically need to pray the maintainer reopens it for some reason."

Truth: There's a public discussion forum!

I'm disappointed that Alex Gaynor never mentioned that the first problem with his program was a bug in CPython, but instead kept that to himself for his blog.

I'm disappointed that Alex Gaynor never mentions in his blog that the next version of his program didn't work on x64 - it hung and timed-out after 1 hour.

Joseph La Fata contributed a Python pi-digits program the same week - his program worked first time on x86 and x64, on PyPy and CPython and Python 3 and only used ctypes to get to GMP.

2 days ago Joseph La Fata contributed a Python spectral-norm program - his program worked first time on x86 and x64 on PyPy and CPython and Python 3.

Do you see the difference yet?

What do you think the blog entry "My experience with Alex Gaynor" would be like?

I wish you'd said all this up front rather than all the rhetoric so far!

Rhetorical questions: What part of the blog could you have fact checked? What part of my comments could you have fact checked?

I hate rhetorical questions. Just say what you want to say. Most people won't react to them like me, but they won't expend the effort to parse them and understand your point either.

I'm not going to fact check every story I read. When I actually do something that requires choosing a platform I may look at the shootout. Or I may just try a few little programs myself.

You may think I'm being unfair, or moronic. But I suspect most people are like me. Even you, when you don't notice. PR feeds on the interested-but-uninvolved.

I find this thread tragic. People could have seen the shootout's side, but now most of them will remain uninformed because the herd passed through while you were asking rhetorical questions. It's the shootout's loss.

I like your standard but I think the real criticism being made is not that it's arbitrary but that it's arbitrary in different ways for different languages. This starts to look like intentional dishonesty. Another standard closer to the status quo would be "anything portable". Why does one language require portability and not another? What is that actual problem with the example given? There doesn't appear to be one.

> Why does one language require portability and not another?

Because more than one language implementation was measured for that language but only one language implementation was measured for the other languages.

If only one language implementation was shown for Ruby it would be Ruby 1.9 - not JRuby

If only one language implementation was shown for Lua it would be Lua 5.1.4 - not LuaJIT

If only one language implementation was shown for Python it would be Python 3 - not PyPy

PyPy and LuaJIT are being treated more favourably than other language implementations.

The irony here is that the proposed PyPy benchmark is more Python than the previous CPython-oriented one.

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