Re: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp

[smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)]

sef@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Fahlman) writes:

> These dynamic languages are ideal for "evolutionary" or "exploratory"
> or "incremental" software development, by which I mean any software
> development in which you don't know exactly what you want before you
> start programming.  It can be argued that practically ALL programming
> is of this kind, and that we should stop fighting that idea and start
> building tools to make it work better.
> 

Howdy,

For various reasons, I've been hacking around in a popular
4GL RDBMS language on a Unix box. It's been a while since
I've sat down at a programming environment like this.

It immediately strikes me how much more simple, fast and
powerful Lisp would be to use as the 4GL (once you get
used to (+ a b) ).  The 4GL is pretty darn slow, has
rather stupid and limmited string handling which leads
to all sorts of gratuitous string copying, etc.

Of course, the 4GL has  few nifty constructs for 
interacting with the database, but these could be
tacked onto Lisp as easily as tacking them on
to the clunky langauge.

Anyway, I think a flexible language that is very
expressive if not the fastest bit twiddler in the
world (e.g., Lisp) is an appropriate language 
for many programming tasks.

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Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
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