You claimed I said "that you cant rely on the results".

Please show where I said that, or admit that you are putting words into my mouth.

This is a discussion forum, not a court of law. I'm not about to trawl through 5 or 6 years of reddit and hacker news comments to find an exact quote.

If you believe the shootout results can reliably show that one language is faster than another, say so. Otherwise, de facto you are saying you cant rely on the results.

People here are smart enough to understand that you want to claim "you cant rely on the results" and to make your claim seem stronger you put your words in my mouth.

Who's putting words in who's mouth now?

You told us "you cant rely on the results" and gave emphatic support to that claim -- "Which is definitely true."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4851984

Your words -- not mine.

You're going a long way to avoid saying that you can rely on the results. If you felt we could, this discussion would be over a long time ago.

I'm stopping this dance here. Feel free to make a claim about the reliability of the results, and whether you can use them to say that one language is faster than another. Then we can dance some more, but otherwise I'm out.

You can rely on the results, the results are what they claim to be on the home page -- "the time taken for this task, by this program, when compiled with this compiler, with these options, on this machine, with these workloads."

> Feel free to make a claim...

The only point of "this dance" was to help people understand that you are putting words into my mouth.

Exactly. You've said it yourself - you cannot rely on the results to tell if a language is faster than another. That was the original context of my claim, and you are admitting it yourself.

I said - "You can rely on the results."

Please say what you mean by "a language is faster than another".

Please say what in The Java™ Language Specification tells us that "language is faster than another."

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/index.html

Exactly. You can't use the results to say that one language is faster than another. It doesn't even make sense.

(That's the context of the conversation, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4851781)

>> You can't use the results to say that... <<

That's a different claim.

>> It doesn't even make sense <<

That depends on what `notJim` meant by "to compare speeds of programming languages".

`notJim` might have thought that everyone would understand he was talking about particular language implementations and particular tasks and particular programs.