Subject: Re: Your introduction to Lisp... From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 00:40:58 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3228684057621203@naggum.net> * Andy <ahz@smi.de> | And btw. Peter said phyton was 100 (!) times slower. Perhaps Lisp has a future as an interpreted language? Maybe this whole compiler thing was the reason it never took off? Lisp was slow and large and interpreted _way_ ahead of the crowd, but then got fast and lean and mean before the others had time to catch up or even be invented. Such is _not_ good for business. The key problem is that computers are simply becoming too fast for human comfort. Computers have already answered most questions before the human has actually finished asking it, like this: before the tactile response from the mouse or the enter key has reached the brain, the eye detects a change, making it appear that the computer knew what you were going to ask before you did. Clearly, if you are generally slow to begin with, this can be stunningly scary. Our good friends at Microsoft are working day and night to make sure that no computer is ever faster than any person alive on earth today, and many other developers for too fast computers help by reinventing byte code and other slow and bloated interpreters. It also helped a lot with slow and congested Internet links, but now that that is soon history, responsible and idiot-friendly companies compensate for any uncomfortable speed with web pages with tons of Javascript, stylesheets, many nested tables, and a thousand images that say less than one well-chosen word, not to mention the excellent effort by such things as Gecko to make display comfortably and predictably slow. Users can make a very simple test. How fast do you want your autorepeat to work? Set the number of repetitions per second to what you believe is your IQ. IIff yyoouu wwrriittee lliikkee tthhiiss ooorrr llliiikkkeee ttthhhiiisss, you are not as smart as you think you are, and should get a slower computer, too, or maybe use Python. Artificial Intelligence is good, but we cannot have computers that are way faster than their programmers' real intelligence, can we? Moreover, if the computer is busy doing some mindless repetitive task like running a byte code interpreter, it will never figure out what it is _really_ doing, either. The world is yet safe for average people. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief. Post with compassion: http://home.chello.no/~xyzzy/kitten.jpg