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

[Stephen Horne]

On 07 Apr 2004 13:43:26 +0200, Jacek Generowicz
<jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:

>Did you mean to point to this thread containing this post:
>
>http://www.google.ch/groups?as_umsgid=ad2vzxoq.fsf%40ccs.neu.edu
>
>?
>
>[Summary: Troll comes to c.l.l claiming that Lisp is slow. Challenges
>Lispniks to try to beat C++ on speed on a program that was designed to
>test speed of C++ compilers. Lispniks beat C++ for speed in both
>Common Lisp and Scheme.]

OK, I'm seriously out of date and possibly just plain wrong. It should
be clear that I didn't have any particular implementation in mind, and
neither did Mike who I was replying to. The only implementation of
Lisp I ever used, a very long time ago, had given every appearance of
being a pretty simple interpreter and the only time I ever saw a Lisp
implementation as source code it was an interpreter, and given the
kind of metaprogramming possible in Lisp (which for compilation to
work, must imply just-in-time compilation at run time) I just never
questioned the 'Lisp is interpreted' assumption.

Big mistake. Thanks for letting me know.

Though the 30* slower that C claim must be one of three things...

1.  An interpreter, presumably with relatively simple builtins and
    most more sophisticated stuff handled through libraries.

2.  The worst compiler code generation in history.

3.  A complete fabrication.

In my defence, I did say...

: An implementation that has more of the standard operations built in,
: or which used just-in-time compilation etc, may well run much faster.

In other words, I was making the point right from the start that
performance depends on the implementation and these figures may be
from a bad one. Though obviously I wasn't aware how exceptionally bad.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk