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From: cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: RE: The powerlessness of Lisp
Message-ID: <22MAR91.00133476@uc780.umd.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 91 00:13:34 GMT
References: <1991Mar20.192606.29608@linus.mitre.org> <4637:Mar2102:11:2991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
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Dan Bernstein writes:
>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.

Come on, Dan, what's an "objective" comparison?

The only sort of case I know of where a program is written to the same
spec in a number of different languages is class projects.  And in
that case there is very little in the way of a maintenance problem.
Nor is speed much of a consideration.

Just for the record, for the class that I have this account, my term
project took about an hour to write, and the source listing and a
sample run fit on a single page.  That's with comments.  (My prof,
never having seen the language before, was able to understand pretty
well what each step was doing, simply from the comments and the form
of the statements).

Other people, struggling with constructing parsers and symbol tables
and so on took longer.

But is this objective?  

Raul Rockwell