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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: C vs LisP yet again (long but thoughtful)
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Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 17:42:31 GMT
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In article <SCHWARTZ.94Sep21223855@groucho.cse.psu.edu> schwartz@groucho.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:
>simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke) writes:
>   This is because I value my time: programmers are expensive, silicon
>   is cheap. Or, to put it another way, people are more important than
>   things.
>
>That sounds suspiciously like you are saying, "I don't care how slow and
>bloated this application is, it was easy to write."  A better philosophy
>is, "other people are important and numerous, so code as efficiently as
>possible in order that they can make the most effective use of their
>things."

Why is your extreme better than the other?  Surely a balance is needed.

>Your analysis of C and Unix misses this important factor.  In the Unix
>community, Perl, and interpreted language, is now very commonly used for
>systems programming.  It's expressive (your point) and efficient (my
>point), and so people often use it instead of C, even though it means
>loading a large (360K) runtime system.

Perl is not "as efficiently as possible".

360K is not very large, especially compared to typical Common Lisps.

-- jeff
