On 22 June 2010 20:17, Kurt H Maier <karmaf...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Donald Allen <donaldcal...@gmail.com> wrote: >> So, if we take you at your >> word, you are advocating returning to writing assembly code. As >> someone who wrote his first computer program in 1960 in assembly >> language on an IBM 1620, and who wrote an awful lot of assembly code >> in the 1960s and 1970s, I can assure you that's not a good idea. > > And if we take you at your word, are you advocating that we follow > abstraction out until we're using touchscreens to drag Sprog[1] > widgets around? I sure hope not. > > I think what should be pursued is a balance between abstracting out > pain-in-the-ass boilerplate (of which modern C is full) and reducing > programming to mindless library-gluing (which is what Java gave the > world). To be perfectly honest, no matter how well your Scheme program > runs, if it takes up much more system resources than existing C > programs, I don't want it. It's not just about easing the development > load by throwing hardware at the problem -- we've had enough of that.
A word of caution from Don Knuth at this point: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." I have grown to cherish this piece of wisdom over the years, as it often turned out that I had focused my energies on the wrong problems. I am not saying that implementing something in C is "premature optimization", but choosing C over a higher-level language for performance reasons should not be something you do unquestioningly or "as a rule". If you have a simple program which mostly does I/O, _that_ is going to be your bottleneck. Don't worry about the number of instructions your CPU has to execute. > There's no reason I need to bog down my computers with langauge > interpreters -- much less crimes against nature like emacs. There are > plenty of regular languages out there that don't need the > infrastructure scheme does, many of which have already been mentioned > in this thread. > > Thanks for the book link, though -- I didn't know that was available > online these days! > > > -- > # Kurt H Maier > >
