Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: jeff@festival.ed.ac.uk (J W Dalton)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
References: <36p4rb$6gd@relay.tor.hookup.net> <Cx5vqF.5E3@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <36ui4a$3k2@relay.tor.hookup.net>
Message-ID: <CxBJ7o.9Kv@festival.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Edinburgh University
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 19:52:35 GMT
Lines: 59

hutch@RedRock.com (Bob Hutchison) writes:

>[Note, I've had to butcher the References: line in the header to post
>this message, sorry for any inconvenience...]

>In <Cx5vqF.5E3@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>In article <36p4rb$6gd@relay.tor.hookup.net> hutch@RedRock.com (Bob Hutchison) writes:
>>
>>Presumably you have tried to predict the behavior of C programs
>>and found that it can be difficult.  That is, you've written C
>>programs that didn't behave as you expected and had to be debugged.
>>Presumably you don't think it's easy to predict the behavior of
>>C programs in general.

>You presume correctly.  I don't think I am suggesting anything magical
>here.  In fact, I don't think that I am suggesting that a hardware model,
>in fact, helps any programmer at all.  I only suggest that programmers,
>perhaps, learn like other adults and attempt to use simple or already
>understood frameworks to learn new things.  I only suggest that because
>of this they believe they can learn C more easily than lisp, and perhaps
>this is true.

>I am also suggesting that this is probably a mistake on their part.

Ok.  That was not clear (to me) before.

>>Surely there's a wide range of Lisp programs whose behavior is
>>as easy to predict as that of similar C programs.

>And surely there is a wide range of lisp programs that are not
>similar to their C counterparts.  Surely this is true of any language
>that is 'higher level' than another.

Yes, though I'm not sure I understand what people mean by "higher
level" these days.  Look at "very high level" which seems to include
ML on one hand and very specialized languages such as eqn, with
awk, perl, etc near the specialized end.

>>>I think that hardware is designed to support already common environments,
>>>like UNIX and DOS/Windows.  
>>
>>Really?  Is that what hardware designers say?

>If not the designers themselves then their (pay) masters.  The
>ones I know are *very* concerned about this, they were burned once...
>I would't think this is necessarily true of academic designers, but then,
>we are talking about a world that largely requires commercial sponsorship
>for university research.

Humm.  I find it hard to see Intel 386-boxes as being designed to
support Unix, and yet they're very successful as products.  Earlier
Intels were far worse, but also successful.  Many people went wrong
thinking that hardware should be oriented towards particular languages
-- consider Lisp machines; the idea that we should microcode instruction
sets for Prolog, Lisp, etc; object-oriented machines like the Rekursiv;
and so on.

-- jd

