What is the best programming language? This is one of the most popular question for anyone who are going to study new language. I also used to ask myself the same question. As a consequence, it is a kind of a war. The latest thread regarding this question was the hard fight and its copy at Blognone. The truth behind the scene is that you must not expect to get any fairness out of any comparison. There are so many criteria and assumptions which might help some languages. However, it is still worth to try.

According to the third question of a computer science homework, it is about Lindenmayer System Translator. Lindenmayer system aka L-system is a formal grammar for modeling the growth process of plant development. In fact, it is very easy to implement L-system as long as we understand the grammar. In Python, implementing L-system is very very easy.

According to the hard fight which is a comparison of Java, Python and Ruby side by side, the performance is very impressive because Python is faster than the rest. A java guru immediately identified flaws of this test in Java codes. In addition, he also improved the codes for getting faster program. However, he was too busy to perform the benchmarks again himself. I volunteered to do this task on my laptop. After preparing all codes in Java, Python and Ruby, I have to measure how long it takes to execute each code. The tool I used was "time". Everything went well until I was asked to also measure memory consumption in each case. time always gave me zero without any error message. It seems this is a bug in Linux kernel that getrusage() will return zero in all memory related values. Fortunately, I found a workaround using Python!

Not only wget but also MD5SUM, I have been asked how to implement this functionality in C#. Again and again, I wrote below code in Mono on Ubuntu Feisty.

.NET is such a good programming environment because it provides many useful standard libraries. Actually, this concept is very similar to battery included in Python. The best part of .NET is that we have Mono so it is possible to develop .NET application on Linux to run on Windows. I have been asked to find a solution for retrieving content from specified URL using HTTP protocol in C#. Here is the code.

In previous post, I benchmarked several implementation of Mandelbrot Set in Python. To make it more complete, I port a Mandelbrot Set Viewer written in Ruby posted at Codenone using OpenGL to Python and wxPython.