On Jan 20, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Brian Taylor wrote:

Alex: I realize this isn't your central point but I'm curious what benchmark(s) you're citing?

Hi Brian,

Here is an older list of application level (computation + visualization) benchmarks: http://weup.sourceforge.net/demos/rm/index.html

look for instance at the eColi simulation. http://weup.sourceforge.net/demos/rm/rm.html?app=EcoliModel

or the game of life

a newer version compared performance to Java and Lisp (CCL)

Alex

You need to hit the compile button to run

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Alexander Repenning <ralex@cs.colorado.edu> wrote:

One point made:

> It’s probably faster than most dynamic languages.

is still mostly true but as I am tracking the speed of JavaScript versus Common Lisp I can see a scary performance cross over point in the near future (months). Already, in some of our benchmarks JavaScript running in OS X Chrome is getting very close (10% gap) to Clozure Common Lisp. Why is that? Common Lisp has gone STALE. The Common Lisp community preserves Lisp instead of advancing it. The result: flatline! As far as I can tell non of the exciting JIT compiler technologies developed in the last couple of years have made it into any CL implementation. If you follow this trend you may conclude the right thing to do, if you want to continue to use Lisp, would be to compile it down to JavaScript, yes, JavaScript, not C or direct to binary.

Same thing with IDEs: stale, flatline.. Perhaps with the exception of LispWorks it appears that most Lisp programmers are just fine with Emacs. Well, Emacs was great 35 years ago. Remember the actually innovative IDEs of Lisp on Lisp machines? Is SLIME really the best we can do now? Take Clozure CL. As far as I can tell most people, including some the developers perhaps, are using SLIME too. Start using something new. For instance start using the Cocoa based CCL IDE. Yes, still primitive but with real opportunities to create some fine IDE tools that actually would look OK even to a 21 Century computer science students. Nowadays, even browser (e.g., Safari and FireFox) have debugging tools built in that make SLIME look like last century technology that belongs to a computer museum.

The Lisp community is not only small but also fragmented. The 21 century computer science world need no more essays explaining why Common Lisp is the way it is (stale). It is time to leap into action and to IMPLEMENT stuff that is not just interesting to the Common Lisp community but to computer science in general. Play with Clozure Common Lisp the IDE version (Mac and Window). Do not just get frustrated and switch back to Slime but ask yourself "what can YOU do for Common Lisp (or more specifically CCL) to make it cool again"

best, Alex

On Jan 19, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Daniel Weinreb wrote:

> This is a very nice essay to help people get over their
> initial problems with Lisp:
>
> http://pavelpenev.posterous.com/learning-lisp-the-bump-free-way

Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf

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