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From: john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The powerlessness of Lisp detractors
Message-ID: <1991Mar21.155528.6068@linus.mitre.org>
Date: 21 Mar 91 15:55:28 GMT
Sender: john@mitre.org (John Burger)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA 01730
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brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:

    [in response to my description of some complex and fast Lisp programs]

  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.

What does "short-running" mean?  These interfaces run over non-trivial
lengths of time, i.e. hours/days.  What does the up-time of a program
have to do with its speed?

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

So have conditional jumps.  What's the point?  If you want to program
in machine language, do it.

  You can do things with memory in C that you CANNOT even express in
  Lisp. 

Yeah, like trash it.

I don't want to have to know about the underlying architecture, and
you seem to want to program at that level, which explains why you like
Machine Independent Machine Language (aka C).  If that is the kernel
of this comparison, then neither of us is going to sway the other.

But pointers don't have anything to do with the discussion of static
and dynamic typing.  I said:

  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 [C and Lisp] with respect to development time or
  maintainability of code. 

Dan replied:

  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.

I stated such an objective comparison.  This may not be true in Dan's
case, but my impression is that many fundamentalists, err, I mean
detractors of dynamic-typing haven't done any real programming in such
languages.  I've worked on both sides of the issue, and that's what my
opinion is based on.
--
John Burger                                               john@mitre.org

"You ever think about .signature files? I mean, do we really need them?"
  - alt.andy.rooney