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For the part: "Why C instead of Lisp? Because worse is better." Well, C has a distinct position among many other languages such that constructs in C map one-to-
by Aegean 17y ago
For the part: "Why C instead of Lisp? Because worse is better." Well, C has a distinct position among many other languages such that constructs in C map one-to-one to the way the cpu executes. That is exactly why C. Not because it is worse.
I've heard of the term lisp machine but I must admit I am not much informed on details. I would bet that if those took off as real hardware, lisp as a language would take off together with them.
- eru 17y ago> Well, C has a distinct position among many other languages such that constructs in C map one-to-one to the way the cpu executes. That is exactly why C. If computers were Von-Neumann-Machines, this would be true. Modern computers do a lot behind the scenes, that you have to take into account for performance reasoning. E.g. caches. C's concepts also do not play well with concurrency. C has it's value. It's just not that easy to reason.
- astine 17y agoLisp machines were big in the 80s. They died with the AI boom. They're not going to take off again any time soon because Lisp as a platform is no longer nearly as important as it once was. The ability to target Unix/Windows, and the ability to run software to run and interact with software targeting Unix/Windows, is too important to let novel platforms really take off. There are 'Java machines,' for example, which are commercially viable so I understand, but how common are they?