Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!lethe!yunexus!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!quiche!dean From: dean@cs.mcgill.ca (Dean NEWTON) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave? Message-ID: <1991Jan24.153322.1307@cs.mcgill.ca> Date: 24 Jan 91 15:33:22 GMT References: <17374@csli.Stanford.EDU> Sender: news@cs.mcgill.ca (Netnews Administrator) Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Lines: 25 In article cutting@parc.xerox.com (Doug Cutting) writes: >In article SEB1525@mvs.draper.com writes: > > The Big Win is: Storage management in Lisp is a non-issue. > >No, Garbage collectors don't make storage management a non-issue, they >just make it less of an issue (unless you don't care about performance). I suppose the same thing used to be said about virtual memory management. And about compilation. "It's okay for prototyping, or if you don't care about performance. But the real thing should be written in assembler." Perhaps you could do it faster yourself, but hey, life's too short for me to have to waste my time with bookkeeping details the computer should be able to handle. Compilation, virtual memory management, and garbage collection are entirely mechanical processes, and, as we have already seen in the case of compilers, computers can become better at them than most programmers. Kaveh Kardan Taarna Systems Montreal, Quebec, Canada (posting from a friend's account)