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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

>>> As a bioinformatician who is obsessed with high-performance, high-level programming, that's right in my wheelhouse!... Mojo currently only runs on Ubuntu and MacOS, and I run neither. So, I can't run any Mojo code

1. Back to the rust vs mojo article that kicked this off... this isnt someone who is going to use rust.

2. Availably, portability, ease of use... These are the reasons python is winning.

3. I am baffled that this person has to write code as part of their job, and does not know what a VM is! Note: This isnt a slight against the author, I doubt they are an isolated case. I think this is my own cognitive dissonance showing.

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Author here. I do know about VMs. Is it too lazy for me to write that article and not bother to install a VM with Mojo (and Rust and Julia, to benchmark in the same environment)? Maybe. If this was for my work I certainly would have felt compelled to.

On the other hand, the fact that Mojo doesn't run on Windows and most Linux distros is a point in itself. And also, would the blog post really be substantially improved if I had gotten the number of milliseconds right for the Mojo implementation on my computer? Of course not. It should be clear that the implementations are incomparable, and that a similar Julia implementation is very fast which implies that the reason the original Mojo implementation allegedly beat Rust is not because Mojo is faster. It's just a different program.

>> Is it too lazy for me to write that article and not bother to install a VM with Mojo

Yes.

Would you talk about a book you didn't read? Or a movie you didn't see? Not on any meaningful level.

That's not a very good analogy, you can understand code without having to run it.

Someone knowledgeable enough about movies can read a script and know of it's good or not without needing to see it actually produced.

Here, it's possible to read the code and know what the program does sufficient to critique it for what it is.

But he did read the "book" (source code). But ignoring analogies, can you cite a specific benefit to running the benchmark when discussing parsing correctness?

Got the same general impression, TL;DR: wrote a benchmark article without...running it? Then you conclude with "the language I use is faster!!!" based on a one-off run on your machine, which surely isn't the same machine Mojo used to run bechmarks for their website copy?

It's odd to read something that's pretty well-versed with some relatively complex CS concepts, i.e. it's not just a PhD with a blank text editor. But simultaneously, makes egregiously obvious mistakes that I wouldn't expect any college graduate to roll with.

There's a certain type, and I don't know what name to give it, especially because I certainly don't want to give it a condescending name. I call it "data scientist types" when I'm in person with someone who I trust to give me some verbal rope.

Software really feels like it ate everything and everyone. So you end up with insanely bright people who do software engineering as part of their job, but miss some pieces you expect from trad software engineering.

>TL;DR: wrote a benchmark article without...running it?

He benchmarks against the rust implementation, which, unless benchmarks have zero meaning, should be sufficient to get a general sense of the scale of the difference. The post is obviously not meant as the last word on this benchmark, it's meant to show that the benchmark is kinda meaningless.

>Then you conclude with "the language I use is faster!!!"

If this is your take-home from the post, it's pretty clear you didn't read it, or your reading comprehension needs some work. That sentence was obviously facetious, poking a little fun at the author of the original piece.

> He benchmarks against the rust implementation.

No he doesn't.

The post is Mojo for Bioinformatics.

They ran a completely different library, in a different language, on their machine.

They did not run anything in Mojo.

You are asserting one data point of a Rust bioinformatics library on a random machine contributes information about Mojo, and berating me about reading comprehension to cling to that.

> If this is...

"If this is your take-home from my post, it's pretty clear you didn't read it, or your reading comprehension needs some work. That sentence was obviously facetious, poking a little fun at the author of the original piece."

^ seriously, right back at you. With a wink, and hopeful understanding I'm saying subtly "relax partner." Your first reaction should be curiosity when you're confused, not name-calling.

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