Matthew Desmarais wrote:
> Hi Isaac,
>
> I've paid attention to some of the discussions on the shootout here,
> but I'm not sure that I've ever had any of my basic questions
> answered.  Maybe you can answer them.
>
> The site lists as its goal, "to learn about programming languages,
> compare their performance in various (possibly meaningless) ways and,
> most importantly, have some fun!"
>
> What is it that we are learning about programming languages?
>
> What do we gain from comparing performance in "various (possibly
> meaningless) ways?
>
> I don't think that I've learned much from the shootout, but it may
> well be that I'm missing something.  I do that a lot. :)

Interesting questions Matthew.

imo What we learn depends on how actively we participate, and what we
already know or assume we know, and many other factors.

So I should ask
- did you try to make any of the programs faster or more elegant?
- did you try to write programs in a new language?
- did you know there was a language Clean?
- did you understand that relative performance would vary so much from
tcp-request-reply to k-nucleotide to n-body and mandelbrot?
- did you notice any patterns: slow for io, fast for number crunching?
- did you wonder why the Lua program used 100K for nsieve?
etc