Python v COBOL

[Skaperen]

sad that my GPA needed a boost. even more sad that i boosted it with As from a couple COBOL classes taught in a business school department (not in CS; they would never teach COBOL).

[Lokesh555]

Hey,
Python is a language which sacrifices time complexity to allow for rapid prototyping and hence increases productivity greatly but at the cost of execution speed. No matter how technology advances you will always have the problem of productivity vs performance, a language will usually be good at either of the two or decent at both.
Thank You.

[wavic]

Depends on what are you doing. Take a loot at this. This is not an exception.

[Larz60+]

If you read the description, all of the time critical processes of this application
are written in 'C':

The server is written in hand tweaked C trying to take advantage of modern CPUs. It relies on picohttpparser for header & chunked-encoding parsing while uvloop provides asynchronous I/O. It also tries to save up on system calls by combining writes together when possible.

[Skaperen]

Hey,
Python is a language which sacrifices time complexity to allow for rapid prototyping and hence increases productivity greatly but at the cost of execution speed. No matter how technology advances you will always have the problem of productivity vs performance, a language will usually be good at either of the two or decent at both.
Thank You.

but these days, prototyping and development time are cost critical. and, i don't see that reversing for common business use cases anytime soon. it may still be the case for machine learning, but they don't use COBOL for that.

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i still hope to see businesses adopt Python to replace COBOL. maybe we can make a special version of Python just for them, to make it easier for them to code and read: PYTHON IN ALL UPPER CASE.

---

Depends on what are you doing. Take a loot at this. This is not an exception.

i'm going to need to beat up on github to find out why i can't download from their site.

[Larz60+]

time is relative.
I recall my first 'real' programming job.
---
I say real because when I worked in engineering most of what I did was diagnostic programming for the project we were working on, and you weren't an IBM guy (anyone who worked on any makers computer IBM or not) until someone actually gave you the label.
---
A backup which was done on three high speed 9 track tape drives rated in BPI (bits per inch)would take several hours, and many reels of tape.
Today, that same process on an external disk drive would take maybe 5 to 10 minutes.
If you write the code as efficiently as you are able to, especially with the current rate of expansion, will end of more than fast enough in most circumstances, no matter what the (modern) language. Python is winning, that stands for something.

[wavic]

If you read the description, all of the time critical processes of this application
are written in 'C':

The server is written in hand tweaked C trying to take advantage of modern CPUs. It relies on picohttpparser for header & chunked-encoding parsing while uvloop provides asynchronous I/O. It also tries to save up on system calls by combining writes together when possible.

I didn't miss that. It's OK. So many Python modules are written in C or are wrappers around some C library.

[Larz60+]

like cpython

[wavic]

I'm not sure what exactly is CPython. I think this is the engine running the code but... I'm not sure :D

[Skaperen]

a few things certainly will need to be in C code, or otherwise by some means, execute some platform layer instructions.

the other day i was thinking about some odd things and one of them was about what it would take to write an OS in totally pure Python. that would mean not using anything that has any parts in some other language like C. my conclusion is that it would be possible. device drivers might not be. but there are ways around that.