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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

> High efficiency languages include C, C++, Rust, D, etc. I would love one language to rule them all, but it seems that for now there is still a gap between what language to choose application programming and for high efficiency programming.

What is this supposed to mean?

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For most programming, as long as your algorithms are not stupidly slow, clarity is more important than efficiency. In certain situations (video games, embedded devices with few resources) this is less true, and things like the ability to do manual memory management becomes a lot more important.

This is more or less how I interpreted the statement. But grammatically it's hard to parse and I felt it needed a lot of clarification. You're assuming the memory model was the cause of a loss of application clarity but I know many programmers that don't actually feel this is the case.

not most programming. For client side ui work maybe, but pretty much everything I do algorithmic efficiency is a big concern. It's this sort of attitude that gives java it's reputation for being slow and results in behemoth's of software like weblogic.

High efficiency is misleading. They should be called explicit resource management languages.

It was also pretty weird to see Erlang on that list. Erlang may be good at parallelism, but I've never heard that BEAM is especially fast at sequential operations.

edit: s/linear/sequential/

Given that he's a web programmer, I presume "high efficiency" in this case means "getting the most out of the hardware" in a more general sense, to which "idiomatic code is automatically concurrent" contributes quite a lot in some cases.

You're confusing "parallelism" with "concurrency." Also, being fast at sequential operations (throughput) is often times not as useful as having low latency.

I've tried explaining this using terms like system programming or high efficiency programming. I guess it is best to just say "explicit memory management", so I updated the post.

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