Perhaps not. Yahoo is replacing Lisp in it's Yahoo Store software for speed. (And I suspect to ease future coding.)
Paul Graham is "Mr. Lisp" so I assume the Lisp code was implemented very efficiently.
There's still some Perl in the Store Manager though!.
-Lee
"To be civilized is to deny one's nature." | [reply] |
Actually, Graham worked with the CLISP implementation, which is not exactly noted for being the fastest one around. It's quite possible that Yahoo would have been able to get the results they wanted speedwise by switching to a more suitable implementation of Common Lisp. (For example, type and optimization declarations
are ignored, even now, by CLISP.) And while Graham is obviously a very good and respected Lisp programmer (I think I'd stop short of calling Mr. Lisp, though), even he's going to have a problem working around something like that. It would have been interesting to see how it fared if Yahoo had chosen instead to port it to something like Allegro CL, Lispworks, or CMUCL.
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While I have only a cursory knowledge of Lisp and the community, pg seems to be a fairly prominent figure. I've see alot of references to his books and comments are usually speak highly of him. Regardless, I don't doubt that there isn't a way to speed it up, (As I noted, I think one of the additional reasons is many more C/C++ programmers to tap) but I doubt outside of assembler, that you'll get faster runtimes than C with anything. Development time is another issue entirely :)
-Lee
"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."
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