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Comment by corruption | Hacker News Reader

Surely if language X is blub and language Y isn't then Y beats X if all else is even.

Surely everyone experienced at these competitions would quickly figure out that lisp et al are huge competitive advantages, and everyone would quickly switch.

From what I've seen working with some living legends in computer science the language makes almost no difference in actual productivity, it's just personal preference.

It's just trading one performance characteristic for another. Every language has it's sweet spot, and if you know them you are just as productive in that as another.

If you aren't productive in a specific language, you are doing it wrong.

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"Surely everyone experienced at these competitions would quickly figure out that lisp et al are huge competitive advantages, and everyone would quickly switch."

You missed the part where I pointed out that current major competitions don't accept arbitrary languages. That's the key point of my post. All else is not even. If they did accept arbitrary languages I would accept your logic, given sufficient time for network effects to wear off.

Otherwise, if you're going to argue that it's the people and their experience that really matter, you reduce back down to my point, which is that all the experienced people have their experience in C++ as cost-of-entry to the major contest sites and thus tended to use C++ as the language they have by orders of magnitude the most experience in by virtue of it being the only sane choice of the ones actually offered, rather than any intrinsic advantage C++ has over the non-offered languages.

"You missed the part where I pointed out that current major competitions don't accept arbitrary languages."

In this competition, if you wanted to use another language, you just needed to make a starter package (a stupid bot) and some instructions to get the compiler working on their end. So in this competition, arbitrary languages where accepted.

Oh, he talked about learning effects from other competitions. The fact that you could use other languages here doesn't interfere with the argument. (Though you are right, of course.)

Hmm, you're right, I misread his comment. Sorry for the confusion.

Also, there are programming contests that accept other languages, but because these contests tend to focus on finding an algorithm of a given efficiency, it becomes hard to tune the time limits for multiple languages. So they tune to the most efficient/popular languages, which puts everyone not using C++ at a disadvantage.

See, for example, the comments on this page: http://www.spoj.pl/problems/ABCDEF/

"... the language makes almost no difference in actual productivity, it's just personal preference."

If that were true how can we explain the results in this paper

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~trinder/papers/ICFP2007.pdf

which compared writing the same large application in Erlang, Haskell and C++ and showed the C++ program needed 40 times more code than Haskell and concluded:

"The high-level constructs dramatically reduce application size, thereby reducing development time and aiding maintenance."

Well that's simple. Right tool for the job. Erlang was built specifically for telecommunication systems. It's like comparing soap and rest and saying "soap is bloated".

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