general rant over older days

["Reini Urban" <rurban@x-ray.at>]

2008/8/29 Will Coleda <will@coleda.com>:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Allison Randal <allison@perl.org> wrote:
>> Reini Urban wrote:
>>>
>>> I hope you know that this #+() syntax is the only existing syntax.
>>> It is widely used since about 20 years.
>>> The rest is something new we came up with.
>>
>> It's high time for a little progress. Sheesh, in 1988 we were excited by
>> computers with 1 MB of RAM. ;)
>> Allison
>
> Progress is nice, but there is no need for us to re-invent *every*
> wheel for this project.

And I'm tempted to add: Actually even the 1984 version of lisps are
still technically and syntax-wise far advanced over the perl and
parrot state of today. I see not much of a progress. perl5 even lost
undump around that time and the perl compiler was axed last year.

Even then I could connect to my life and running lisp image, inspect
the variables with all its state and type, and not just staring at
hexdumps or intermediate VM ops, test and fix a bug, recompile a
function on the fly and saving away an image while the whole image was
still running. Zero downtime.

Others are now profiling their dynamic compilers [1] and
optimizers[2], we are still and again struggling with the basics. At
least we have a tri-color generational GC (from 1975 [3])
and not Mark & Sweep soon, but I'm not sure if the GC with external
objects (nci) is
solvable when live PMCs will be allowed to move. Just to make it faster.

  http://www.memorymanagement.org/news/history.html

Nevertheless I do prefer the dirty state of today over the perfect
state from ancient times. CPU get faster and cheaper. HDs get bigger.
And MSVC supports now almost dynamic recompilation and the stabs can be
dumped away. Great. Almost back in the 80-ies.

Footnotes:
[1] Java and .NET slowly doing now what LISP did in the 90ies.
[2] http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey (optimize loops dynamically, nice)
[3] http://www.memorymanagement.org/bib/f.html#dlmss76
-- 
Reini Urban
http://phpwiki.org/ http://murbreak.at/