Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave? Message-ID: <3969@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 18 Jan 91 12:31:19 GMT References: Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 42 In article SEB1525@mvs.draper.com writes: >The Big Win is: Storage management in Lisp is a non-issue. It's certainly a big win, but it's not quite a non-issue. For example, Lisp programmers are often advised to resort to explicit storage management in order to avoid generating garbage, and some significant applications have been carefully written so that no garbage is generated. This is, presumably, less important with modern "non-intrusive" gc techniques, but I don't think the problem has yet been reduced to zero. BTW, I complain about Lisp only because I want it to get better. I would much rather use Lisp than C, but there are times when I have to use C because the available Lisps are too big to too slow for whatever it is I want to do. >I'd say that a very significant chunk of C programming is devoted to >this pain-in-the-ass storage management stuff. And that's not even >considering the problem of string-building, where you can shoot >yourself in the foot so easily without feeling a thing. Yes, but C is _much_ faster for such things as readign through files (or at least it seems to be), in part because one uses pre-allocated arrays rather than constructing strings. (There's nothing that prevents similar techniques from being used in Lisp -- in principal -- but current implementations tend not to provid it.) >>On the other hand, when the problem and its solution are well-defined, >>a language like C is a more likely choice. The code is written, the >>executable delivered, and then set aside until a round of bug fixes. > >Point is, that round of bug fixes lasts virtually forever in C, whereas >in Lisp the code is much more likely to be nearly bug-free at delivery. The problem is convincing the right people that this is so. Many people are used to seeing strong typing as a necessity, or at least as an important factor in producing reliable code. And Lisp looks very unsafe to them. (As does C, but for less "pervasive" reasons.) -- JD