On Jan 25, 2008 12:47 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 12:41:01PM -0800, Chuck Esterbrook wrote: > > Paul Graham is trying to be this person: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham#Arc_Programming_Language > > He may succeed. He seems to have good taste. > > > And yes, the Scheme guys were creating a better LISP, but not a better > > Common LISP which they worked on *later*: "Scheme predates CL, and > > comes not only from the same Lisp tradition but from some of the same > > engineers?Guy L. Steele, with whom Gerald Jay Sussman designed Scheme, > > chaired the standards committee for Common Lisp." -- the "Comparison > > with other Lisps" of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_lisp > > Yea I like these guys...Steele and Sussman. 'Sure be nice to hear them speak > if they are still alive. > > > But um, wouldn't comparing strings be awfully slow? > > Ug...don't go there. As a Python master, you're the last person I would have > guessed would go down this slippery slope. Designing a language based on > performance rather than readability/terseness/elegance is not only unPythonic, > it is very 1970s. :)
You can have both. I've believed this for many years and have been frustrated that both are not being provided in one language. I once had to abandon a Python code base for a financial analysis program because I could not squeeze any more speed out of it. Not fun. There are plenty of fascinating fields that require performance including AI, games, scientific applications and simulations. You can use the slow languages (Python, Ruby, LISP, Smalltalk) to a certain degree until you start pushing parts out to C, using them only for glue, or simply waiting a long time to get your results. But now we have Cobra. It reads and writes very cleanly, but has good performance. It almost looks like Python and runs at about the same speed as C# and Java. http://cobra-language.com/ Maybe we can tackle that after Scheme? :-) -Chuck -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
