Funny comment heard on Adafruit's Ask an Engineer tonight

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MichaelMeissner

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I listen on and off to the Ask an Engineer segment on Adafruit on Wednesday night. Limor (i.e. Lady Ada) was talking about the @arturo182 board that uses the NXP 1062 chip (same as in the Teensy 4.0). She said the main reason you might need a chip with the speed of the NXP 1062 is because you are using CircuitPython and it brings the speed of emulated code up to reasonable levels. Working on static compilers for the last 40 years, my thought was, just write the code in C++ and it will be much faster. :) Of course the fact, that I have hated Python since it came out due to the required indentation rules, adds to it.

That being said, there is certainly room for interpreted languages, but if you are worried about performance in an embedded system, it might be time to think about recoding the project into C/C++ or something similar.

Note, I am not against interpreted languages. They certainly have their place. For example, have been using perl for 20+ years now, and it makes a great language for knocking out text handling and such. Generally I don't care about the performance on most of the scripts, but I have a few scripts that are on the slow side (mostly the script that analyzes instructions generated with Spec 2017 builds that now takes a couple of hours to run, and I've had to tweak it to keep the run time sort of reasonable).
 
This triggered some thoughts
Whenever I hear the name "Lady Ada" I always must think about Ada Lovelace ((1815–1852), the first "compute"´ programmer) and the programming language ADA that was named after her. Now, if Limor (nowadays Ladyada) uses CircuitPython to promote new hardware, I note some hidden irony...
Even if I never needed to program in ADA, I understand it was designed to provide robust mission critical software (also for embedded systems)
Now, there is ADA available for ARM chips https://www.adacore.com/press/gnat-gpl-for-bare-board-arm, maybe I will give it a try (even if only to keep the brain going on)
 
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