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A comment on Selecting a programming language can be a form of premature optimization. Parent comment

Re:Selecting a programming language can be a form of prematu... by munificent on Monday November 15, 2021 @01:40PM (#29230885)
> Time and time again, a 1-2kloc Python prototype, the bulk of which was written in a week, would take months to translate to C++, at times longer than the whole process of research+prototype.

I've heard reports like this for many years.

My pet theory is that the discrepancy here is ~10% static types and ~90% memory management. Having a GC (or refcounting or whatever) fully baked into the language so that you don't have to think at all about how values are passed around and stored is a monumental productivity boost. Possibly the biggest win in software engineering productivity in the history of the field.

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Re:Selecting a programming language can be a form of prematu... by ptx on Monday November 15, 2021 @05:04PM (#29233439)
Absolutely. I recently translated Microsoft's example code for using the Windows crypto API from C++ to Python, and huge chunks of the code melted away as it was mainly concerned with freeing buffers. Exceptions also helped.
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