Good languages that are elegant and fast executing
Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 4:08 am
I love PHP, but I've also been reading about using PHP as the "glue" to piece together components compiled in lower level code, etc.. I'm thinking about playing with a lot algorithms that might be CPU intensive and thus a candidate for a compiled language. Most likely I'd create a library of separate utilities that can work together on the shell, and just use PHP to glue these together with objects and shuttle data in & out of mysql. My question is what languages should I be looking at? I've heard of smalltalk, erlang, haskell, java, Eiffel, ANSI C.. all that stuff but what seems like a good candidate for what I'm doing? Portability isn't really a factor. Doesn't java integrate with PHP somehow? Do a lot of languages have solid mysql integration?
I like the idea of having a refactoring browser, the wierd syntax of smalltalk intimidates me, so does python.. I think I'd have to get used to not using the curly braces.. in practices is this just me being anal, or does this really make it easier to screw up your indentation? I'm guessing ANSI C will probably perform best? I guess I realize compiled languages are going to be best, but how do I even start to contrast the trade-offs between performance, ease of learning, productivity, etc?
To clarify these are going to be mostly data crunching to infer meaning from interesting data sets. For instance if you have user rating for items on a website you can use various algorithms like pearson correlation effect ( http://www.texasoft.com/images/winkpe1.jpg ), Bayesian and neural networks, etc etc..
I'll probably port my centroid function too
( viewtopic.php?f=1&t=44074&p=247765 )
I also have some interesting map rendering code and even access to some nice vector GIS data sets.. all the legacy code I wrote is in PHP and we eventually axed the thing and replaced it with google maps anyways.. but I'm thinking I might be able to rewrite some of this stuff in faster languages and be able to render out the detail that we were lacking before, due to logistics with performance, and do some interesting things...
Anyone else play with anything like this? Even if some of you can just point out interesting languages I can research, it would be very helpful. There's just something cool about the thought of setting up a cluster of data crunching boxes in my garage
On a side note any cool machine learning or general mathematics libraries that should steer me towards one language over another?
I like the idea of having a refactoring browser, the wierd syntax of smalltalk intimidates me, so does python.. I think I'd have to get used to not using the curly braces.. in practices is this just me being anal, or does this really make it easier to screw up your indentation? I'm guessing ANSI C will probably perform best? I guess I realize compiled languages are going to be best, but how do I even start to contrast the trade-offs between performance, ease of learning, productivity, etc?
To clarify these are going to be mostly data crunching to infer meaning from interesting data sets. For instance if you have user rating for items on a website you can use various algorithms like pearson correlation effect ( http://www.texasoft.com/images/winkpe1.jpg ), Bayesian and neural networks, etc etc..
I'll probably port my centroid function too
I also have some interesting map rendering code and even access to some nice vector GIS data sets.. all the legacy code I wrote is in PHP and we eventually axed the thing and replaced it with google maps anyways.. but I'm thinking I might be able to rewrite some of this stuff in faster languages and be able to render out the detail that we were lacking before, due to logistics with performance, and do some interesting things...
Anyone else play with anything like this? Even if some of you can just point out interesting languages I can research, it would be very helpful. There's just something cool about the thought of setting up a cluster of data crunching boxes in my garage
On a side note any cool machine learning or general mathematics libraries that should steer me towards one language over another?