From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
Subject: Re: Choosing a new language
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:41:43 -0500
Date: 2007-12-29T08:41:43-05:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <uabnt7h48.fsf@stephe-leake.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: e2san397g3fqop93k7el3doplle6m4r714@4ax.com
George Neuner <gneuner2/@/comcast.net> writes:
> On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:54:57 -0800, John Nagle <nagle@animats.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Actually, the ability to "fix a running program" [in Lisp] isn't
>>that useful in real life. It's more cool than useful. Editing a
>>program from a break was more important back when computers were slower
>>and just rerunning from the beginning was expensive.
>
> Speak for yourself.
>
> The ability to patch a running program is very useful for certain
> types of embedded applications. Not every program having high
> availability requirements can be restarted quickly, or can be
> implemented reasonably using multiple servers or processes to allow
> rolling restarts.
And in applications like IDEs, dynamically loaded functions are very
important. Improving Emacs is vastly easier because Emacs Lisp is
interpreted. You can make a small change to a function and quickly
determine its effect. That's one reason (among many others :) I have
not switched to GPS (which is written in Ada).
--
-- Stephe
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2007-12-29 13:41 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 27+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2007-12-28 15:23 Choosing a new language Rico Secada
2007-12-28 17:15 ` Joachim Durchholz
2007-12-28 17:18 ` smallpond
2007-12-28 20:54 ` John Nagle
2007-12-28 22:57 ` George Neuner
2007-12-29 9:30 ` Joachim Durchholz
2007-12-29 9:37 ` Paul Rubin
2007-12-29 18:16 ` Joachim Durchholz
2007-12-29 18:22 ` John Thingstad
2007-12-30 11:41 ` Joachim Durchholz
2007-12-29 13:41 ` Stephen Leake [this message]
2007-12-28 22:49 ` Gary Scott
2007-12-29 5:29 ` george.priv
2007-12-29 6:07 ` byte8bits
2007-12-29 22:56 ` Samuel Tardieu
2007-12-30 2:07 ` Rico Secada
2007-12-30 9:02 ` Pascal Obry
2007-12-30 20:52 ` Jacob Sparre Andersen
2007-12-31 4:38 ` George Neuner
2008-01-02 19:36 ` kevin cline
2008-01-03 7:32 ` Tim Roberts
2008-01-07 17:25 ` kevin cline
2007-12-29 12:35 ` bearophileHUGS
2007-12-29 15:11 ` Achim Schneider
2007-12-29 17:58 ` Arnaud Delobelle
2007-12-29 18:39 ` John Thingstad
2007-12-29 15:40 ` j.khaldi
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