Re: Lisp considered unfinished

[kr@shell.portal.com (kr)]

At 15:05 6/7/95, John Doner wrote:
>There is the problem of efficiency.  I don't mean whether the
>compiler can generate fast code.  The problem is seeing whether one
>has written good code or not.  It is hard to tell.  I have a friend
>who maintains a large Lisp program written years ago by others.
>Often, he comments on what poor code is there, and he improves it.
>But the original coders were hardly Lisp neophytes; why didn't they
>see how bad the stuff they were writing really was?

But is this any better for a different language ?

Writing efficient code could really be a difficult problem, and requires a
deep understanding of the problem at hand. Often much more speed-up is
gained by rewriting, using entirely different algorithms and
datastructures, rather than merely fine-tuning a piece of code.

What could make quite a practical difference though between languages, is
the quality of profiling tools in the development environment, that will
allow one to quickly determine where all that time is being burned up.


Greetings
Markus Krummenacker