Future of Gnucash (Javascript?)

[Anthony Dardis]

On Wed, 29 Dec 2010 04:32:44 -0500, Herbert Thoma  
<herbert.thoma at iis.fraunhofer.de> wrote:

> On 28.12.2010 22:35, Christian Stimming wrote:
>> Am Dienstag, 28. Dezember 2010 schrieb Jeff Warnica:

<snip>

> I am not that sure that an interpreted language is a good idea. But I am
> an electrical engineer not a computer scientist. So I tend to prefer
> languages that are closer to the hardware ...
>
>   Herbert.
>

My recent programming experience is a lot of little number-theory puzzles  
 from the Euler Project, 40 or 50 in Python, the last 10 or so in c. I have  
something of the same feeling of wanting to be close to the metal. But I  
have to say that Python is a real joy. It is syntactically beautiful. It  
is semantically amazingly powerful: all those basic data structure types  
(lists, trees, ...) are mostly transparently available (for example: I'm  
pretty sure that the set type is implemented as a balanced tree, since  
random access is incredibly fast even for sets with millions of members).  
Since it encourages functional style programming, it's possible to write  
astonishingly elegant code. (Of course, it's also possible not to, but  
that goes without saying.) For computation, Python is really really fast:  
agreed, the programs I've tried run about 10 times faster in c than in  
Python, but on modern hardware we're still talking hundreds of  
milliseconds. For GnuCash, computation speed is irrelevant. The GUI will  
be handled by GTK (or whatever).

And coding a solution in Python, I suspect, is always going to be a lot  
faster than in c, assuming equivalent levels of experience in both.

Tony