Hacker News Reader

Comment by quickben | Hacker News Reader

A few of us perceive it as unrealistic, because it's too restrictive. C/C++ are general programming languages and I feel I am flat out eliminated before even starting. So if you didn't target the general programming languages, who did you want to target with the challenge?

Also, heck, it's a challenge, we all want in, please make it so :)

View on HN

Makes sense. I will try to update the article! Feel free to use whatever library that helps you to compose your program nicely. It would be nice though, if those libraries were in a set of standard libraries ;) If you need to implement all helpers yourself, my point "in Julia, you can just sit down and start implementing a pretty difficult problem" would become a bit watered down... First of all, Julia is also pretty multi-purpose - and secondly, if you put it to the extreme, you could just write a DSL that you parse in C++ that is perfectly tailored to the problem, and consider the challenge as won :P

Yes but, then we can draw some scientific conclusion.

If I can outperform Julia by 50% in C++, but I have to write 10x code. I won't bother with C++.

If you manage to have that in the end, that's a very valuable promotional information.

For one of my master courses, I had to write 200 lines in python. C++ solution would have been in the thousands. My colleague solved it in 10 R lines. R is on my list now :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com