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"APL has been compared to a diamond, which cannot be made into a larger diamond by the addition of a second one. LISP, in this context, is a ball of clay." I c
by smabie 7y ago
"APL has been compared to a diamond, which cannot be made into a larger diamond by the addition of a second one. LISP, in this context, is a ball of clay."
I couldn't have said it better myself. I've come to think that APL and Lisp represents two diametrically opposing philosophies about structuring programs. Right now I'm leaning toward the opinion that the ball of clay approach has run its course and is no longer (or maybe never way) viable. The thousands of layers of abstraction is no longer viable, for both performance and productivity reasons.
- zdkl 7y agoYour conclusion may well be correct but I must reject your reasons : 1) we have more (cheap!) hardware capacity than we can shake a stick at so sub-optimal performance is very tolerable and 2) depending on how you measure productivity, i'd argue high level/many layers of indirection languages let you deliver features and value faster than non ball-of-clay languages at the cost of weaker confidence in the code. Which can be mitigated to some extent by more clay :) Personnaly, give me mud over diamonds any day.