Disappointed in historical baggage in Lisp - Lisp needs to be redone

[James G. Sack (jim)]

Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2008 12:47 PM,  <chris at seberino.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 12:41:01PM -0800, Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
>>> Paul Graham is trying to be this person:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham#Arc_Programming_Language
>> He may succeed.  He seems to have good taste.
>>
>>> And yes, the Scheme guys were creating a better LISP, but not a better
>>> Common LISP which they worked on *later*: "Scheme predates CL, and
>>> comes not only from the same Lisp tradition but from some of the same
>>> engineers?Guy L. Steele, with whom Gerald Jay Sussman designed Scheme,
>>> chaired the standards committee for Common Lisp." -- the "Comparison
>>> with other Lisps" of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_lisp
>> Yea I like these guys...Steele and Sussman.  'Sure be nice to hear them speak
>> if they are still alive.
>>
>>> But um, wouldn't comparing strings be awfully slow?
>> Ug...don't go there.  As a Python master, you're the last person I would have
>> guessed would go down this slippery slope.  Designing a language based on
>> performance rather than readability/terseness/elegance is not only unPythonic,
>> it is very 1970s.  :)
> 
> You can have both. I've believed this for many years and have been
> frustrated that both are not being provided in one language.
> 
> I once had to abandon a Python code base for a financial analysis
> program because I could not squeeze any more speed out of it. Not fun.
> 
> There are plenty of fascinating fields that require performance
> including AI, games, scientific applications and simulations. You can
> use the slow languages (Python, Ruby, LISP, Smalltalk) to a certain
> degree until you start pushing parts out to C, using them only for
> glue, or simply waiting a long time to get your results.
> 
> But now we have Cobra. It reads and writes very cleanly, but has good
> performance. It almost looks like Python and runs at about the same
> speed as C# and Java. http://cobra-language.com/
> 
> Maybe we can tackle that after Scheme?  :-)

I wouldn't mind that. Might be a good development/test/critique
environment for writing up additional tutorial materials.

Regards,
..jim