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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.object
Subject: Re: blip [Re: Dynamic typing -- To Have and Have Not ...]
Message-ID: <11820:Mar1923:59:3591@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 19 Mar 91 23:59:35 GMT
References: <1991Mar16.052952.10201@cs.cmu.edu> <3523:Mar1803:21:0591@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <22032@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Organization: IR
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In article <22032@yunexus.YorkU.CA> oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
> Lisp or Scheme's advantages in expressiveness are not slight at all, but
> still, it is amusing to see you acknowledge the expressiveness of those
> languages you do not know much about _exceed_ those languages that you do
> know something about.

Indeed, and I'm glad to hear that you've stopped beating your children.

Of the languages that I've used much, I find Forth the most expressive.
Lisp and C come in way below, and several other languages (which,
naturally, I've given up on) compete with Pascal and Fortran for the
bottom of the bucket. I don't know enough about Scheme to judge it, but
by all accounts it is more expressive than Fortran or C. Yet I continue
to use C (and, when necessary, Fortran) much more than any other. Why?
Because Forth is not portable, Lisp on anything but a Symbolics is so
slow that my test runs often take ten times as long, and Ada compilers
are snails.

Expressiveness is nice. Anything syntactic is nice. But I don't need
niceties. I need portability. I need fast compile times and run times so
that the machine's turnaround time during testing and debugging doesn't
become a significant part of my turnaround time. I need language power:
full access to what the machine can do. Lisp doesn't have any of this.

> Also, do you really understand what "expressiveness" mean? 

Yes, I think so. Do you?

> >In contrast, the supposed conciseness of dynamically typed languages
> >costs dearly in compile time, run time, and (for projects with many
> >debugging runs) programming time.
> Dan, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Actually, I have a reasonably good idea of what I'm talking about. My
comments on dynamically typed languages are based not only on my
experience but also on many objective and subjective articles by both
detractors from and proponents of such languages. As a matter of fact,
if you want to buck the establishment, it's your problem to prove that
dynamically typed languages aren't as inefficient as most experiments
have found them to be.

Would you write a compressor in a dynamically typed language?

---Dan