Re: [Chicken-users] [Chicken-hackers] Any thoughts on performance woes?

[arc]

On 08/04/15 00:18, John Cowan wrote:
> Felix Winkelmann scripsit:
>
> > That there are so many implementors in the Lisp and Scheme community
> > probably makes this irrational emphasis on (execution-time)
> > performance so apparent in these groups. Or it's the remains of the
> > trauma of the AI-Winter, I don't know (and I don't care anymore.)
>
> I believe it's older than that.  There was a steady drumbeat of
> "Lisp is too slow to be usable" practically from the 1950s onward,
> and you can still find it in certain ignorant quarters.  As a result,
> the Lisp/Scheme community acts like the traumatized victim of a bully.
> There are certain other language communities that do the same things
> or the same reasons.

Speaking of #scheme some years ago: as soon as I saw Felix's complaint 
about the obsession on performance, I recalled you expressing this exact 
point, posed in the form of a riddle as to what made one group of 
languages different from the other :-)

(which was a bit tricksy, come to think of it... one doesn't normally 
think of a property of the community being a property of the language...)

These days, though, aren't the complaints more along the lines of 'it's 
old', 'I hate parentheses' (read: 'I refuse to learn anything without a 
C-like syntax') and 'what's the point? it has no commercial value.'?

-arc.