Shanti’s Dispatches

That’s what James Hague asks here.

For that kind of money, I’d be willing to learn any programming language in the world.

Assembly?

MOV   AX,1234H
MOV   BX,5678H
PUSH  AX
PUSH  BX
POP   AX
POP   BX

No problem. (Took an ASM class in college — it was actually quite fun.)

Lisp?

(defun sqrt-iter (guess x)
  (if (good-enough-p guess x)
      guess
      (sqrt-iter (improve guess x) x)))

(defun improve (guess x)
  (mean (list guess (/ x guess))))

I’ve actually tinkered with Scheme/Lisp, but never got far enough down the rabbit hole to understand why Paul Graham and the Lisp brigade are so excited about it.

C++?

#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

main()
{
   vector vI1Matrix(3,0);
   vector< vector > vI2Matrix(4, vI1Matrix);
   vector< vector< vector > > vI3Matrix(5, vI2Matrix);
   …
}

Once you get past the pointer arithmetic and annoying compiler errors, C++ doesn’t seem too bad. Not to digress, but I’ve never met a CS problem I couldn’t tackle without the use of pointers. While I understand their power, it reminds me a bit too much of Lotus spending eighteen months to rewrite 1-2-3 so that it could fit into 640K of RAM (by the time it shipped, most computers had 2-4MB of RAM).

So, What Programming Language Would I Use if $100,000,000 Was on the Line?

Java — combined with any other optimizations from languages like C/C++ as necessary, and nice extras like JRuby, etc.

James goes on to ask:

And if a hundred million dollars changes your approach to getting things done in a quick and reliable fashion, then why isn’t it your standard approach?

Let’s run the numbers. If your typical consulting gig is $10,000 — then a 100-mil project is worth what… 10,000 times that?

If your annual salary is $100,000 then $100 million is still 1000 times that amount.

Just like you wouldn’t build mission critical NASA software using your new favorite toy programming languages — it also makes no sense to overoptimize and write your fun Web 2.0 application in Assembly, or Java, for that matter.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos