On Friday, February 16, 2018, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
So people have called me on the claim that lisp is not fast. Here's a
rebuttal.
Please write a clone of GNU grep in lisp to demonstrate that the claim
that lisp is slower that C is false.
Best of luck and I'll be super impressed if you can get even remotely
close without dropping into C or assembler. If you do get close, I
will with draw my claim, stand corrected, point future "lisp is slow"
people at the lisp-grep, and buy you dinner and/or drinks.
--lm
Good challenge. I consider anything that came out of MIT's ITS/Lisp (including Emacs) culture as totally opposite to the UNIX/C culture. Complexity vs. minimalism are the best words to explain both approaches to computing.
--Andy