He is not arguing purely for throwing money at hardware: A good engineer would balance the tradeoffs and solve the problem within the existing resource constra

He is not arguing purely for throwing money at hardware: A good engineer would balance the tradeoffs and solve the problem within the existing resource constraints. A theoretical computer scientist would whine until he got a big enough machine to implement the mathematical solution with the least amount of fussing about the constraints of the real world. The post at the start of the Usenet thread asks if any Lisp implementation can handle inverting a 20,000 by 20,000 matrix. Naggum is arguing that if you really had that problem, you are probably working in an industry where the choice of Lisp implementation is irrelevant, because solving the problem is so lucrative that you could afford to write your own Lisp implementation, if needed. He's saying that you will throw money at both hardware and developers to get the job done. Edit: He also does not compare Fortran and Lisp.