Dear Tim! On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 12:46 AM, TimDaly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > After I posted about *my* intention to make clisp disappear from Sage > > in the long term at alt.sci.symbolic William and I got in a long off > > list discussion with Fateman about Maxima, Axiom, Sage and lisp in > > general. Among the point Fateman made about me pointing out that > > building lisp from source sucked were: > > > > He never had to build lisp from source, so what is the problem? > > Richard was deeply involved in lisp and knows a fair bit about the > subject, more than he lets on, but that's up to him to defend. I > have great respect for his opinions. > > I helped William Schelter in the development of GCL back when it > was known as AKCL. He used my office often during his visits and > we worked closely on portions of its development. I have written > parts of the garbage collector and some other small pieces so I'm > intimately familiar with the guts of it. > > > > > > That is so short sighted it isn't even funny, i.e. water comes out of > > the spout, electricity is supplied by the socket in the wall. And I > > can only say the the Open Source lisp community is far behind on its > > tools ... > > eh? really? not for me. but that way lies language-wars so lets stop. > > > > In the end it all boils down to platform support and I see ecls as the > > silver bullet here for Sage+lisp. > > I have no idea why you think ECLS is a silver bullet. Three years ago > I > moved Axiom onto the handheld Zaurus using GCL. And many years ago I > moved Axiom onto DOS 3.0 using GCL. Maxima runs (fast) using GCL. Why > do you want to move off that platform? It contains everything you > need, > it builds from source, it is actively maintained, and is very fast. > I'm > sure you have good reasons for choosing ECLS but I don't understand. > > Frankly, I'd think that it would be straightforward to write a python > compiler in lisp (if only the EU would give me the $20M Euro it gave > the other project). Once that was done you could compile and optimize > the python automatically. My son implemented a commercially available > PHP compiler in lisp in under 3 years and python is about the same > complexity. In fact, if I were still teaching the compiler course, I'd > assign it as a class project. Until python has a decent compiler I > have trouble considering it anything more than MS-basic with classes. > (And that, of course, is certainly NOT gonna make me popular).
just speaking for myself here: another way at looking at things is that I want to use today's (maybe imperfect) tools and today's (maybe busy) people and I want to get something useful (maybe imperfect) today. And the beauty of it is to manage everything just right to get something useful out of it, that people actually find interesting and usable. Yes, I love to live just now. :) Also I love the Linus quote "Talk is cheap. Show me the code.". So it's nice it's maybe theoretically possible to write a python interpreter in lisp, but right now, at this very moment, there is no such thing in Debian, so that is not a technology for me. Ondrej --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
