On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 01:58:14AM +0100, katja wrote:
In my (not so huge) coding experience, I've always noticed that code typing is the least time consuming aspect of a dsp project. To figure out a good concept takes longer. Testing and bug fixing takes longer. Optimization takes longer. I've once written an optimized FFT lib (in C). It took me a month if I remember well, and that was not because of all the code typing.
+1
For me, learning the subject and making good design desisions, then learning languages are the biggest overheads, measured in years or decades. Then debugging, correcting mistakes, optimising, packaging... these are things that take days or weeks. Once an idea is set in motion, actual coding seems to happen in sprints of a few dozen hours, and is largely independent of the language.
Shortcuts made because a language is compact and elegant only pay off where you write millions of lines of code. Some might properly aruge that you make fewer mistakes with an elegant language, but there is much more to elegance than compactness. In fact elegance, in the eye of the beholder, is quite subjective. C++ is a beautifully rich language that is very concept heavy, a far more mature tool than I need to do most DSP tasks.