From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2008-05-02T18:25:42+09:00
Subject: Re: How about the execution efficiency in Ruby 1.9?

On 2 May 2008, at 03:44, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>> Well there's lots of room for improvement in the Icon VM, what with  
>> the current design being fifteen years old and written in its own  
>> god-awful macro language that adds additional overhead. On the  
>> other hand, I did significant physical simulations using it on an  
>> i386 for my degree dissertation and never found it particularly  
>> slow so if Ruby 1.9 is in the same ballpark now that's a good  
>> improvement.
>> As for the lack of Icon benchmarks, well judging from the activity  
>> on the Unicon mailing list I'd be surprised if there's more than a  
>> few hundred of us worldwide who ever use it. Makes Ruby look  
>> positively mainstream ;)
>
> The main use of it that I'm aware of is in the build process for  
> Norman Ramsey's "noweb" literate programming tool. Ralph Griswold,  
> the creator of Icon (and SNOBOL!) passed away last year, and I don't  
> know if anyone has stepped into a maintainer role.

Yes, I was very sad when the news broke as he was one of my personal  
heroes, both for his work on Icon and for the important role he played  
in the birth of Unix and other Bell Labs projects. He was ahead of the  
curve with both Snobol and Icon but the elegant scanning environments  
these championed have never gained the traction of regular expressions  
(much to my personal annoyance) nor has Icon's goal-oriented  
evaluation. I often miss the latter when working on Ruby problems and  
end up spoofing it with exceptions, which is a very clumsy approach.

I don't know who's now maintaining Icon, but its OO offshoot Unicon is  
be actively developed by Clinton Jeffreys and has a small but loyal  
community. It's fun to play with and even has support for graphics and  
CGI these days - I used to have a couple of websites powered by it  
before they fell off the net  - but outside of noweb Un/Icon lacks a  
killer application to put it in the mainstream.

No matter how good the language, without users it's always going to be  
stuck in a niche :(


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason