[Shootout-list] demoting marginal languages

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Isaac Gouy wrote:
>
> Yes, I suggest removing languages that have so little interest no one
> has bothered to implement 15 of these trivial programs.

There is a slippery slope here, however.  In open source land, labor for
doing this kind of work is not plentiful.  I think we should be
repositing people's incremental results, not requiring some bold
volunteer to step forward and write all the tests for a given language
in one fell swoop.

I think it's reasonable to deny a LCD score to any language that can't
complete all LCD tests.  i.e. effective LCD score of 0.  However, I
don't believe the language should be removed from the Shootout, and I
think the data on individual tests should be available on the language's
webpage.  It's the composite LCD score I'm talking about suspending.
The "front number."  Can't complete the tests, then you don't get a
ranking.  That's the penalty for a language community being asleep at
the wheel.

If the number of hours needed to run benchmarks is an issue, such
languages could be placed in a 'provisional' category, with fewer
regular benchmark runs than languages with complete tests available.

Regarding the issue of too many languages to look at: if a LCD benchmark
is fairly agreed upon, then it would be most fair to list languages in
order of their performance.  A tab to re-list in alphabetical order
would be desireable, but 'by performance' should be the default.  That
way, everyone's got an incentive to get on the ball.  And languages
which aren't getting on the ball, are duly ignored by the masses, as
well they should be.

Thus the problem of information overload scales up and solves itself.
We aren't really going to end up with issues of "which Scheme
implementation."  The best implementations will rise up the ladder.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed McKenzie