Frankly, i'm not convinced there's any point in investing time on improving the benchmarks there, considering the overall comparison directly contradicts the detailed comparison, by putting perl in a worse position than languages it outperforms.
Replying to myself because I want to add something interesting (to posterity) that I noticed today on Alioth:
Perl (or OS) was upgraded from 5.14.* to 5.16.2. From cursory glance this gave all the Perl benchmarks a little boost. For eg. My fasta is about 3 secs quicker and the "interesting alternative" fasta dropped below 2.0 barrier (now timed at 1.96).
However on the summary Perl slowed down a few points (here's the new bottom five on u32 single-core benchmark):
I think the drop is because the Perl pldigits benchmark is now failing. The Math::GMP module can't be found. Pretty sure this wasn't a core module so perhaps a Perl dependency has been removed in the OS (Debian).
PS. This maybe a temporary glitch so that dependency maybe restored soon. If not then I may amend pldigits benchmark accordingly.
PPS. I see that Python pldigits is using gmpy and is working fine. This means that GMP is installed (as is gmpy Python library) so it's just the Math::GMP perl module that's missing :(
> You don't seem to understand what the overall comparison shows.
I told you i don't. It looks entirely nonsensical. I asked you for clarification. So far your only response has been to parrot my saying that i don't understand why your data representations are dissonant.
> Are you familiar with descriptive statistics?
Possibly under another name, but i don't know what you mean when you say that.
> Quartiles?
In theory yes, i am unsure how you're applying it here, since we're not talking about binnable quantities.
>> I told you i don't. It looks entirely nonsensical. I asked you for clarification. So far your only response has been to parrot my saying that i don't understand why your data representations are dissonant. <<
It would have been better if you had said -- "English is not my primary languages and especially english maths are hard for me to grasp." -- instead of saying "it certainly seems deceptive".
You say you are familiar with box plots, so you should have no difficulty understanding that box plot shows - the Perl and Ruby programs have very similar performance when compared to the fastest programs.
"Visual Presentation of Data by Means of Box Plots"
Those two sentences are not a contradiction. I may not be good with reading english descriptions of math, but i am good with applied math. The calculations i did with your numbers disagree with what your graph showed. So to me the graph seems deceptive. There is no contradiction in this.
Further, if you show me the actual calculations done, i will understand it perfectly fine. Yet you refuse to do so. I do not understand why, and i hope you can understand how that makes me even more distrustful.
On the graph in the overview page Perl was shown to significantly outperform Ruby in a number of benchmarks, yes, i could see that. Yet the median of Perl was still set higher than the median of Ruby, which could possibly be explained by perl also being outperformed significantly in one benchmark, but which was not supported by the actual direct comparison numbers.
So i ask again: Please show me the actual calculations performed to arrive at the median values shown in the overview graph.
Okay, i worked it out, no thanks to yoo. Actually, i fucking worked it out IN SPITE of you. All your condescending hints and links and such were entirely bullshit and did not even remotely lead in the direction of explaining why the data seems dissonant. They were flat out orthogonal to the entire problem.
The important thing which you did not bother to point here even once is that the comparisons on the overview page are done against the fastest programs of all languages, thus weighting the results by a factor that is simply not present when one language is compared directly against another.
So, alright, the graphs do entirely make sense.
Would you be open to a patch that reworks the language vs. language comparison pages in such a manner as to make this relationship obvious?
