From: Giles Bowkett <gilesb@...>
Date: 2006-05-24T02:27:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

> Lisp has a tiny syntax.
> Lisp has uncountable years of development.
> Lisp had lots of people who wanted it to go fast, so it goes fast.
...
> Ruby has lots of people complaining about it being slow but only a
> handful of people doing something about it.

Lisp does not have uncountable years of development. unless you're
speaking in terms of man-years, which would indeed be very difficult
to calculate, Lisp has 48 years of development (not counting
brainstorming or experimentation prior to its original specification
in 1958). I can count to 48 and I'm sure this ability is not unique to
me.

however, I think your point is actually a very good point. if the
things I've read have been true, compiled Lisp has performance
competitive with C and superior to Java. it started out slow and
became fast because people wanted it to do that. if people want Ruby
to do the same thing, the work is there for them to do.

I'm still skeptical about the whole question, though. if **other**
things I've read have also been true, you can get much better
performance improvements from putting your database in RAM than you
can from any language change. in fact, don't quote me on this, but my
recollection is that the difference was measured in orders of
magnitude.

-- 
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org