[Shootout-list] Ray tracer

[Isaac Gouy]

--- Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 28 April 2005 09:01, Bengt Kleberg wrote:
> > Isaac Gouy wrote:
> > >>I've boiled my program down to 94 LOC
> > >
> > > Hmmm 94 LOCs of not Java and not C# - that's really helpful.
> >
> > would you care to explain what your comment means?
> > (anybody else that understand is also free to explain)
> 
> I believe Isaac is saying that we need to have submissions under 100
> LOC in both Java and C# or the benchmark is not suitable for the
> shootout.

I like Jon's enthusiasm and advocacy for OCaml - enthusiasm and
advocacy is surely why most folk contribute to shootout.

Effective advocacy requires that we pay attention to the needs of the
audience: 

1) There's no need to advocate to OCaml programmers - they already get
it. The *target audience* is C programmers, C++ programmers, Java
programmers, C# programmers... 

2) afaict the first thing folk do is to check out the position of
"their familiar favourite language" on the scorecard, then they try to
figure out if there's something wrong with "their familiar favourite
language" programs that they can fix; and then if they have time and an
abundance of curiousity, they might even look at some programs written
in languages they don't know.

(Maybe they'll just see the names of unfamiliar languages above "their
familiar favourite language" on the scorecard. That's good - name
recognition matters a lot.) 

3) Most folk have too much to do and too little time - the longer they
spend figuring out what "their familiar favourite language" programs
are doing, the less time they can spend exploring what the unfamiliar
programs are doing. 

Spend all their attention budget on 500 lines of C and they aren't even
going to look at OCaml. 

 
> I don't know either of those languages, which makes that hard for me.

I think we're all doing well to have a workable knowledge of 2 or 3
languages ;-)

Work with others who do know those languages.


> Of course, with 97 LOC in OCaml, the nbody benchmark is perfectly
> acceptable 

Personally I'm not interested in officious quarrels about "rules" - 100
LOCs of Java / C# was a ballpark target for the attention budget of
someone browsing the website.

(As you previously noted, LOCs for nbody are even more misleading than
LOCs generally are - there's a lot of data initialization dead-code.)

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