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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
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Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 18:51:46 GMT
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In article <37otug$j8g@news.u.washington.edu> dsc@u.washington.edu (Devin Cook) writes:

>Here is my two cents worth:
>
>Lisp is slow and comes with two much baggage.  The number of keywords you
>need to get going is overwhelming.

Perhaps you are thinking of Common Lisp rather than Lisp?

And for "slow", it's presumably particular implementations.

>  Also, since Lisp is weak at I/O, its
>hard to write small programs to play with. 

So what does "Lisp" I/O lack?  (This is a real question, not a
rhetorical one.)

>Debugging is also a real pain.  (Trace) just doesn't cut it in this day
>and age.  The problem is that with properly written Lisp code, ( at least
>this is what it says in the books! ) there are NO intermediate results to
>examine and tell you why some code doesn't work. 

What books have you been reading?  There are plenty of intermediate
results, and many of them will be the values of variables.

It's true that trace alone is somewhat limited (though a good
trace can do more than you might expect).  But trace if far from
the only debugging tool available.

>If the MC2 interface is as nice a Lisp IDE as Lisp guys can come up with,
>Lisp is dead in the "real world".

So what would you suggest as a good IDE for comparison purposes?

-- jeff
