OFF-TOPIC:: Why Lisp is not my favorite programming language

[Matthias]

Stephen Horne <steve at ninereeds.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> On 6 Apr 2004 13:58:45 -0700, nish20 at netzero.net (Mike Nishizawa)
> wrote:
> 
> >mintiSPAMBLOCK at yahoo.com (Minti) wrote in message news:<e87fc4b0.0403221114.254b7ee5 at posting.google.com>...
> 
> >> However when some one says that the code might be 31.?
> >> times slower as compared to C, kinda of scares me. Could assert such
> >> figures. I know speed is not the one and only goal but just wondering
> >> if these figures are correct.
> 
> It wouldn't surprise me. LISP is normally interpreted - maybe always,
> though I'm not certain of that. The interpreter would be written in C.
> And, depending on the implementation, the built-in list operations may
> well be much more basic than those in Python, for instance, meaning
> that more of the relatively sophisticated operations will be handled
> using interpreted library code.

Sounds reasonable, but is almost completely false:

1.) Lisp is normally compiled.  (Almost every Common Lisp
  implementation compiles to native code, as do many Scheme
  implementations.)

2.) The built-in list operations are at least as sophisticated as Pythons.
  (Common Lisp's are more sophisticated.)

3.) Lisp is normally much faster than Python and comes "close" to C
  (depends on how much you care to optimize your Lisp code). See
  http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html (the colorful table at the
  bottom of the page) for some data.