Comments on: GC Lingua Franca(s) https://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/02/gc-lingua-francas Safeguarding Humanity Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:51:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.1 By: Keith Curtis https://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/02/gc-lingua-francas#comment-79879 Sun, 13 Feb 2011 03:37:40 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=1528#comment-79879 @Joel:

“Failed to comprehend OpenCog engineering challenges” is a blanket statement coming from someone working on AI. Is knowledge really so binary?

There are plenty of ways to compile Python today. Bazaar / Bzr has gotten faster, but you should compare Mercurial. Mercurial is much faster than CVS / SVN, and is fast enough compared to GIT. It is 1% C and 99% Python. You need to look at the success stories, and learn from the failure stories. If you looked into Bzr’s perf problems, you would find they have nothing to do with Python, and everything to do with the algorithms. It is tricky to build an always fast source control system.

So when you next say that Python isn’t right for the core of OpenCog, you are drawing that conclusion from your inaccurate data.

You do have the resources to re-implement the core. How many months work is a Python port? Have you figured out how much faster it will make your current dev workitems? I didn’t really believe you’ve thought this through much at all. The code has been C++ since 2001, and you are acting on inertia.

You don’t see the benefits and you are afraid of bad performance, so you feel you don’t have time.

]]> By: Joel Pitt https://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/02/gc-lingua-francas#comment-79854 Sat, 12 Feb 2011 07:26:15 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=1528#comment-79854 Unfortunately the author guy seemed to fail to comprehend much about the engineering challenges involved with OpenCog. We spent a fair bit of time exchanging emails on our OpenCog mailing list and he was already decided and mostly wanted to proselytise SciPy. He seems to think that, simply by virtue of more people using something, it will become faster. GC is a hard problem and different projects have different demands for memory usage. The wrong choice can cause unsatisfactory performance.

Bazaar (a Git competitor) is written in Python and it’s slowness is actually a negative factor for many users. I love Python to prototype in, but like any engineering challenge you use the right tool for the job.

Python isn’t the right tool for the core of OpenCog.

(On the other hand, something like Erlang might be if we had the resources to reimplement the core… but alas, we don’t ;-( )

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