Re: GTK signals question.

[Chris Angelico <rosuav gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 6:27 AM, Chris Moller <moller mollerware com> wrote:
> On 03/05/14 13:52, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > Is there a reason you're trying to write high-level code in C?
>
>
> Habit, mostly.  I've been coding in C since the early 80s and I can do it in
> my sleep.  Python's okay, but I tend to think of it more as a scripting
> language rather than something I want to write a 50k-line application in.
> (Actually, the app I'm writing now uses Python as it's scripting
> language...)  I'd never heard of Pike but, looking it up, the "interpreted"
> bit makes me wonder about performance.

You're writing a GUI program, which normally means it'll be waiting
for the user most of the time. There's a lot you can do without even
nudging a CPU monitor. Interpreted languages were fairly slow a few
decades ago, but these days, the difference isn't that great - and
computers are so much faster, anyway. It's usually a good tradeoff to
save development time by spending a smidge more on an interactive
action. I mean, let's just suppose that C code is a hundred times
faster than Python (which it usually isn't, but "let's pretend", as
Alice said). In most cases, that'll mean Python will take 10ms and C
would take 0.1ms to respond to a user action - that is to say, the
difference between "immeasurably fast" and "immeasurably fast". And in
reality, the difference isn't nearly that great; if it's even ten to
one for anything other than heavy numerical computation, I'd be
amazed. And Pike's faster than Python overall, reducing the difference
further.

Happy to talk to you on- or off- list about Pike or Python. They're
both excellent languages.

> > PS. Has anyone else noticed that this thread is more than half by
> > people named Chris?
>
>
> Years ago, I worked in a lab where about a third of the people were named
> Ron.  Confusion reigned...

Heh, it's weird how that goes. I have a brother named Michael who's a
rail enthusiast, and one time he was car-pooling his way to some rail
event or something, and all four occupants of the car had the same
name. One was Mike, one was Mick, I can't remember who the other was,
and my brother goes by Michael, so it wasn't confusing, but it was
amusing.

I find that people named Chris are often geeks. We can have long
sub-threads on python-list between Chrises, and every list I join
seems to have at least a couple more. Rather neat, actually.

ChrisA