this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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[โ€“] SmokeyDope@piefed.social 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

I'm only a hobbyist no skin in the game but as an engineer first programmer second I feel like how you design the architecture of your logic and how you choose to prioritize computational optimization or feature implementation have a much bigger impact than language. Obviously theres a time and place like using luajit instead of lua if you really need that speed boost, but in big complex programs I'm willing to bet lazy programmers skip optimization steps and copy paste thousands of lines to ship quickly regardless how performance optimized the underlying language is.

I make a module that does a specific thing for version 1, after initial bug patches and maybe a feature addition theres usually an epithany that the logic can be generalized into an api type registry structure that allows the code to be reused and configured as needed on per item basis. Along the way you do stuff like ask what the not expensive calls are, add accumulator timers to reduce unneeded CPU usage , ensure early returns are up top when it makes sense, choosing to render a cleverly crafted sprite instead of a full 3d entity.

A conditional if then logic loop Is a logic loop no matter what Turing complete language its written in. What really matters is how you use the loop not which syntax its written in.

[โ€“] olafurp@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

You make a fair point, programming skill is more important than language but picking a programming language is still important in a lot of cases.

Ecosystem size can reduce "reinvent the wheel" code.

Some languages just have dogshit performance like Ruby, lua is pretty good though and it absolutely matters when you have to crunch a lot of data. Access to developers is big since you ideally want to find someone with experience in the language your project is in.

Some languages like Rust are very good for making safe code but very bad if you want to get out a microservice fast. I could make an equally correct version of some adapter in a fourth of the time in python compared to rust and I know them similarly well.

Then there's low RAM requirements like embedded devices, it's best to run something that compiles to machine code and doesn't need a big runtime. Java and C# become almost useless in very low RAM environments and you'd have to use Zig, C or Rust instead.

So long story short, depending on what you're writing it can just not matter or matter a lot.

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