Choosing a new language

[Stephen Leake]

George Neuner <gneuner2/@/comcast.net> writes:

> On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:54:57 -0800, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com>
> wrote:
>
>>    Actually, the ability to "fix a running program" [in Lisp] isn't
>>that useful in real life.  It's more cool than useful.  Editing a 
>>program from a break was more important back when computers were slower
>>and just rerunning from the beginning was expensive.
>
> Speak for yourself.
>
> The ability to patch a running program is very useful for certain
> types of embedded applications.  Not every program having high
> availability requirements can be restarted quickly, or can be
> implemented reasonably using multiple servers or processes to allow
> rolling restarts.

And in applications like IDEs, dynamically loaded functions are very
important. Improving Emacs is vastly easier because Emacs Lisp is
interpreted. You can make a small change to a function and quickly
determine its effect. That's one reason (among many others :) I have
not switched to GPS (which is written in Ada).

-- 
-- Stephe