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From: kirk@triple-i.com (Kirk Rader)
Subject: Re: C is faster than lisp (lisp vs c++ / Rick Graham...)
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Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 14:48:15 GMT
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In article <Cv9q23.89q@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

[...]

>I have not been disingenuous at any point.  Either you've
>misunderstood me, or you need to look up what the word means.

I used the word I meant.

[...]

>But *I* have not responded to *you* as if what you quoted was all you
>considered.
>
>I think you may be misunderstanding what you just quoted.  What I am
>saying is that when A quotes passage X and responds, A may have
>considered more than X.  *You* have reacted as if I considered only
>what I quoted.  In fact, I have considered everything that you said
>that reached me.  It's possible that I've misunderstood you, but if so
>it's not because haven't paid attention to everything you've said.

No, you accused me of using "an old net technique" in claiming
unjustifiably that you were including only the most negative sounding
quotes and responding as if that were all I had said.  I still think
that is what you have _in fact_ been doing, whether that is "an old
net technique" or not.  (Perhaps it has become "an old net technique"
because the tactic of which it complains is actually rather widely
used?)  I also think that your reponses even to many of those quotes
you have left in have missed the mark, since your replies often seemed
to me to have gotten what I said wrong or not to really be relevant to
what I had said.  Since I credit you with the knowledge, skill, and
intelligence to know what you were doing in all this, I feel justified
in speculating that you have been disingenuous.  But perhaps it really
is just a prolonged misunderstanding, after all.

>Now, I suspect what you're actually trying to accuse me of is
>distorting you by quoting out of context.  If you or anyone else
>can point to any case where something I quoted means something
>different in context, I will be glad to retract what I said
>in reply and to apologize.
>
>-- jd

What I am actually accusing you of is either through honest
misunderstanding or deliberate distortion responding to arguments I
never made in support of positions I do not hold, and making this seem
not altogether ridiculous through selected excerpting of my messages
in your replies.

Once more for the record, and it is to be hoped finally, let me state
the position I have taken in this thread.  Different tools are better
for different tasks.  Asking is lisp (or any other language) too big
or too slow is not well-posed without some information about
application requirements.  Given that, it is false, or at least
misleading, to say that lisp (or any other language) is unequivocally
_not_ too big or too slow, as was done in the message to which my
original post was a reply.  Is Fred too short?  Maybe he is too short
to be a basketball player, but he may be just the right height to be a
jockey.  Does that make being a basketball player better or worse than
being a jockey?  Of course not; it does, however, recognize that the
requirements of the two occupations are different such that different
people are likely to have better natural aptitude for one than the
other.  The same is true for programming languages, so it is just
silly to argue endlessly about which language is "better" in some
absolute sense.  But in my opinion it is equally silly, and in the
particular case which prompted me to comment, dangerously misleading
to pretend that lisp _must_ be better than C or some other particular
language for all or even almost all applications simply in virtue of
the fact that is more powerful, or makes one more productive, or
anything else.  It seems to me that the state of the art in the design
and implementation of programming languages has not advanced to the
point where any one language is suitable for the majority of
applications, so prudence is required when choosing, or more to the
point recommending, what language to use for a particular application.

Now this is not the first time I have said any of the above, and you
have already stated on several occasions that you agree, which is why
I see no point in dragging this on endlessly.  I predict that you will
now respond, however, by taking some particularly inflamatory sounding
quote out of context from some previous posting and say, "if that is
all you meant, why did you say this other?"  The answer, again as I
have said before, is that I would not feel it fair or honest to simply
let stand unchallenged what have seemed to me to be mis-statements of
fact about the relative performance of different programming languages
for particular kinds of applications.  You and others have accused me
of trying to discourage people from using lisp, despite my frequent
references to the fact that I consider lisp well-suited to a variety
of kinds of applications.  What I _have_ been trying to discourage is
people, probably through over-compensating for what they perceive as
lisp-bashing, pretending that any language is actually good at those
specific kinds of tasks at which it is really bad.

