> In 1987 this code took around half an hour to run, today 0.03 seconds. Progress eh? The thing I take away when reading this is that in 1987 there were super

> In 1987 this code took around half an hour to run, today 0.03 seconds. Progress eh? The thing I take away when reading this is that in 1987 there were superior languages to C which — while usable — were just a bit too sluggish, and hence lost out. I'm thinking specifically of Smalltalk & Lisp, but I'm sure that there are others (maybe ML was around that far back?). Well, if a program which once ran in half an hour can now run in 300 milliseconds, I think that maybe we should reconsider using just a little of that extra performance to run a better language environment. Imagine if we had OSes written in safe languages which catch errors rather than allowing programs to misbehave. Honestly, it's hard for me to do because I've become so accustomed to crashes. Recently I've been doing some X programming with Lisp, and it's amazing — even when I make a mistake, things keep on running properly. I just see an error and that's that. Well, most of the time, anyway. Nothing's perfect. Still, the experience is orders of magnitude better than writing C. I mean that literally, not figuratively. (Also, as an aside: when I switched tabs to the article, it displayed for just a second, then disappeared. Reader mode didn't even work. I had to enable JavaScript just to view some text. What gives‽)