Re: following up on speed

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Mike Salib wrote:

>
>The really weird thing is that the problem posed could be most easily
>solved using associative arrays (hash tables, dictionaries), but none of
>the C++ and java coders did so. Instead, they opted to manually build a
>search tree which was takes a lot more work. In contrast, all of the
>scripting language coders used their the language/library's hash table
>implementation. Even though the java and C++ people had a perfectly good
>hash table implementation available to them, they didn't use it; this is
>not unusual in my experience.
>
Well, it's extremely unusual in my experience. If anyone on our 
programming team (the BPM
product at eXcelon) had done that, we'd send them straight back the 
drawing board.

>
>
>The study is available at
>http://www.ipd.uka.de/~prechelt/documents/jccpp_tr.pdf
>
It says that the non-script programmers were computer science master's 
students,
whereas the script programmers were volunteers recruited from Internet 
news groups.
With all due respect to students everywhere, I'm afraid I think this is 
sufficient to explain the results.

>