OT: languages & performance [was RE: ++CD-ROM drive]

["Jonathan Shore" <jshore@example.com>]

> From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:turnbull@example.com]
>
>     Jonathan> lisp readable (if you wrote it)
>
> Why, thanks!  I didn't know I had fans out there....

Well meant in the "you" introspective sense, but sure you write great stuff
anyway (don7t know if I've looked at any of your emacs code though) ;)

>
> Actually, I find Lisp readable when others write it, as much so as my
> own programs.  I used to think not, but then I realized that (a) I
> wasn't a very good Lisp programmer, and (b) there are more correct and
> elegant ways to write Lisp than one would believe.  And it's not just
> a matter of whether the curly braces line up under the "if" or are
> indented two spaces....

Regarding readability, sometimes functional programming makes this more
difficult as behavior can be so deeply buried in a stream of "functions"
[translation, you may need to read the code carefully to see what is
happening].    Another reason that this can be difficult is because of all
of the meta-languages one tends to generate on the fly in lisp.  Can be
quite beautiful but hard to grok without carefull examination.

>
> Ah, so that's what you were getting at.  Sorry, but the myth that GC
> is inefficient is evergreen ... it's a natural mis-take.

Just depends on how often you need to do it - really a data granularity
issue I think.  One generates garbage in any language, but the garbage, say
in Java, is often larger grained than in typical lisp programming.

>
> I think the fact that people discuss garbage collection is much less
> of an indication of fundamental problems with Lisp (or other gc
> environments such as Java (burp), Perl (cough), and Python (choke))
> than you might think.  First, most implementations of these
> environments use really bad gc -- the three mentioned above are even

True their GC implementations are inferior but is often less of an issue
because of:

- how people use the language
- tendency of the language not to be a prolific garbage generator (can't say
this about python)
- expectations (python is a scripting language)


> fascinating in itself.  It's not surprising that programmers would
> latch on to it.

Hmm, there are big, in not bigger, communities of java, python, <name other
gc languages here>, and yet there is much less discussion on this topic.
Ok, maybe, lisp attracts more of an elite set.

JS