Future of Gnucash (Javascript?)

Donald Allen donaldcallen at gmail.com
Wed Dec 29 10:18:22 EST 2010


On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Anthony Dardis <adardis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Amen to everything you've said here. And coding in Python is going to
be faster than c++ as well. And finding people who can write good
Python is always going to be an easier task than c or c++. Another
issue is readability. I would assert that it is far easier to read and
understand someone else's Python than someone else's c++, especially a
factor in a volunteer project like this one, where people can wander
off without jeopardizing their paycheck.

/Don


>
> Tony
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