{"id":78,"date":"2010-10-27T06:31:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-27T06:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2010\/10\/27\/factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-programming-language\/"},"modified":"2010-10-27T06:31:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T06:31:00","slug":"factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-programming-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2010\/10\/factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-programming-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Factors to consider when choosing a programming language"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning a colleague and I spoke briefly about choosing a programming language for some high-performance scientific computing (thermodynamic calculations) he wants to do. I started writing an e-mail with a couple of my thoughts, and then thought it would make a pretty good blog post for the same amount of time. So here’s my list of things to consider when choosing a programming language. Note that these are not orthogonal to one another – many seem to describe the same thing from different angles. This is just my musings, not a research study.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Popularity<\/span>. This is a very important one. A good place to start is the Tiobe index<\/a>. You are more likely to find people to collaborate with if you use a popular language. You are also more likely to find reference material and other help. Unfortunately, the most popular language globally may not be a good match for your problem domain.
    <\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Language-domain match<\/span>. Choose one that matches your problem domain. You can do this by looking at what other people in your field are using (after adjusting for popularity, so don’t think the match with Java is good simply because a lot of people are using Java) or by looking at some code that solves problems you are likely to have and seeing how natural the mapping is.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Availability of libraries<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>. Some would argue that this is the same as the point above, but I don’t think so. If there’s a library that solves your problem well, you’ll put up with some ugly calling conventions or hassle in the language.<\/li>\n
  4. Efficiency<\/span>. Languages aren’t fast – compilers are efficient. Look at the efficiency of compilers or interpreters for your language. Be aware that interpreted code will run an order of magnitude slower than compiled code as a rule of thumb.<\/li>\n
  5. Expressiveness<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>. The number of lines of code you create per hour is not a strong function of language, so favour languages that are expressive or powerful<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. Project-size<\/span>. Do you want to be programming in the large or programming in the small<\/a>? Choose a language that supports your use case.<\/li>\n
  7. Tool support<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>. Popularity usually buys tool support (and some languages are easier to write tools for). If you are a tool-oriented user, choose a language with good tool support. Just read this article on tool mavens vs language mavens<\/a> before you make a choice.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Note that all these things have no single right answer: they define the languages on my Pareto front<\/a>. A good starting point to observe the trade-off between expressiveness and efficiency is the Computer Shootout<\/a>. Also check out this analysis<\/a> of some of the results.<\/p>\n

    Of course, a personal blog need some personal input, right?<\/p>\n

    I happen to know many languages, and the combination I use at the moment is Python for prototyping and Fortran (2003) for speed. Python is popular (it’s the second interpreted language on the Tiobe index, after PHP, which sucks for scientific stuff). It’s got a really nice set of libraries<\/a> for the jobs that I am doing now and makes wrapping Fortran<\/a> code easy. Fortran has some really good compilers (and the free gfortran<\/a> is pretty good), and suits matrix-oriented programming really, really well. YMMV<\/p>\n

    Both of these languages have good tool support in Emacs (my favourite text editor) and Eclipse (which I am slowly picking up).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This morning a colleague and I spoke briefly about choosing a programming language for some high-performance scientific computing (thermodynamic calculations) he wants to do. I started writing an e-mail with a couple of my thoughts, and then thought it would make a pretty good blog post for the same amount of time. So here’s my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[122,187],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","tag-choices","tag-ramble"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}