[erlang-questions] Learning Erlang from the scratch

[Bengt Kleberg]

greetings,

my main problem with the alioth shootout is that it has thrown away one 
of the main ideas/insights from the paper(*) that was the inspiration 
for the original shootout. namely that it is very important to look at 
how the timeing changes with the size of the input.
the alioth shootout takes only 3 very similar size values.
to make things worse these 3 values must give results for the major 
languages (no timeout, etc).

(*)Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing, 
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/interps/pap.html)


bengt
Those were the days...
    EPO guidelines 1978: "If the contribution to the known art resides
    solely in a computer program then the subject matter is not
    patentable in whatever manner it may be presented in the claims."


On 2007-08-31 20:54, Michael Campbell wrote:
> On 8/31/07, G Bulmer <gbulmer@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>> Another idea for exercises - you might take a look at "The Computer
>> Language Benchmarks Game" at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
>> They have a bunch of small benchmarks coded in Java and Erlang (and 30
>> + other languages), so you can see how the same algorithm would be
>> coded in both languages, or try coding it yourself based on the Java
>> code. Who knows, you may come up with a better implementation.
> 
> Be careful with that.  Alioth's shootouts are for how quickly a
> language can run a particular *algorithm*, which can at times be VERY
> DIFFERENT from how you would normally do it in that language.
> 
> So some of the code on that will be weirdly contorted to fit the
> particular algorithm, rather than what the prevailing idiom is for
> that language.
> 
> A somewhat more harsh criticism can be found here:
> http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2006/07/11/erlang-yaws-vs-ruby-on-rails/#comment-70
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