Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
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From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Which one, Lisp or Scheme?
Message-ID: <1997Jan27.104004.5310@wavehh.hanse.de>
Reply-To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Organization: '(a (cons structive organization))
References: <slrn5e5geh.dl.yunho@csl.snu.ac.kr> <5c0th8$iqd@nntp.hut.fi> 	<3062798163303133@naggum.no> <1997Jan23.150438.27424@wavehh.hanse.de> 	<3063102967705823@naggum.no> <GJR.97Jan24102802@hplgr2.hpl.hp.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 97 10:40:04 GMT
Lines: 49
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:24886 comp.lang.scheme:18180

gjr@hplgr2.hpl.hp.com (Guillermo (Bill) J. Rozas) writes:

>In article <3063102967705823@naggum.no> Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> writes:

>|   From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
>|   Date: 24 Jan 1997 13:56:07 +0000

>|   that's how I meant that the free Lisps have mostly worked to turn people
>|   away from Lisp.  I didn't mean that you can't find free Lisps that people
>|   would have flocked to if they would only get over their prejudices.  I
>|   meant that they don't, because of the many toys they have used and think
>|   are the norm.  it seems, for instance, that in educational settings, Lisp
>|   and Scheme are not at all presented with anything resembling speed in mind,
>|   and so students who are used to C and C++ and ads reading "X compiles Java
>|   at over 10,000 lines per second", will have trouble _not_ remembering that
>|   speed was never discussed, that their compilers and interpreters were slow,
>|   etc, etc.  I mean, we have people come in here and state that Lisp is an
>|   interpreted language at least once a week!  it's an image problem, and it's
>|   a tragic element of that story that as Lisp implementers focus on other
>|   things, students and amateur programmers are turned into speed fanatics
>|   because that is the only forte of those other languages and systems.  (and
>|   never mind that Allegro CL for Linux produces code that runs rings around
>|   C++ under Windows NT on the same machine.  *sigh*)

>Actually, I think that the speed of the implementation, although
>important, is nowhere near as critical as other components.

While I think the rest of your posting is very valid, this statement
is not.

An existing performance problem in an implementation is usually a sign
for a misdesign. Several times I thought I should be clever enough to
work around such problems, only to find out that the implementors
aren't stupid either and the problem is a hard one.

I found myself quite often in a situation where a apparent minor
performance problems with a given language implementation (or OS, for
that matter) persisted and got worse and worse as a project continued.

I found CMUCL to be the only free CL implementation without major
performance showstoppers, and only when not taking PCL/CLOS into
account.

Martin
-- 
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"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
 plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
