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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: The powerlessness of Lisp
Message-ID: <4637:Mar2102:11:2991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 91 02:11:29 GMT
References: <1991Mar20.192606.29608@linus.mitre.org>
Organization: IR
Lines: 39

In article <1991Mar20.192606.29608@linus.mitre.org> john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger) writes:
> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>   ... even if compile times were instant I'd spend forever just
>   waiting for most programs to run.
> Based on my experience, this is nonsense.  I develop AI applications
> in Common Lisp that do complex things like understand natural language
> utterances and reason about how best to design graphical
> representations of information, and these programs run fairly quickly,
> i.e. fast enough to act as an interface to another program.

Wow. So you have a naturally complex but short-running program. I admit
such programs exist. They are not the mainstream, at least not in
systems programming and numerical programming.

>   A machine is much more than its ``primitive datatypes.'' But Lisp
>   doesn't even provide full access to pointers.
> What does this mean?  "Pointers" are an artifact of languages like C,

Be serious. Pointers (a.k.a. addresses) have been in every machine
language at least since 1960.

C provides a concept of ``memory'' (more precisely, the set of all
pointer values, which equals the set of all char pointer values modulo
typechecking) and pointers into memory. You can do things with memory in
C that you CANNOT even express in Lisp. To return to the original point,
C is more powerful than Lisp in this area.

>   In fact, I've been focusing on the prototyping and development stage
>   of a program, because that's when it's most important to get good
>   compile times *and* run times.
> As someone who has worked in a C shop in another life, building
> business applications, I can say that there's no comparison between the
> two with respect to development time or maintainability of code.

And I can say that the continued refusal of dynamic-typing advocates to
actually *make* such a comparison objectively is one mark of a true
religion.

---Dan