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5:15:17
beach
alandipert: So you don't work for industry? I mean, if you did, you would know first hand, right?
5:16:28
alandipert
beach i have many friends become wildly successful with tech and techniques i considered stupid, so now i try to keep an open mind
5:17:23
alandipert
well, i think that's maybe a philosophical line of argument that bottoms out at personal values
5:18:09
beach
There is not always, perhaps not even often, any particular reason why things turn out the way they do. So there is no great point in speculating why this or that thing failed or succeeded, and certainly no reason to connect success or failure to quality.
5:50:55
beach
We often get the question "If Common Lisp is so good, how come it is not more popular". Underlying that question are several assumptions that are false. One is that if something is good, it automatically becomes popular. Another is that people are rational.
5:52:53
beach
Industry is no better. When they say "All our programmers already know <language-x>, so that's what we will choose for our project", they implicitly suppose that 1. all languages are roughly equivalent, no matter the task at hand, and 2. training our programmers will cost so much that it will be much more expensive than the advantage represented by the gain in productivity.
5:54:54
beach
And when they say "We need all the speed we can get, so we choose <language-x>", they are implicitly saying that they are willing to spend an unbounded amount of money for even an epsilon increase in performance.
5:55:33
beach
In other words, industry is not even capable of doing an elementary risk analysis involving elementary mathematics.
5:58:45
beach
ebrasca: I am not going to retype all the computing history I think you ought to know here in #sicl. You really need to take the time to study it offline. You will understand much more about what you are missing, and how to fix the current dismal situation.
6:02:16
beach
ebrasca: And ask yourself the following questions: Why do I have to stop execution of an application such as Firefox in order to install a new version of it? And why do I need to stop execution of all my applications AND the operating system in order to install a new version of the operating system?
6:04:16
beach
Do you know what incredible kludges that are needed to make such a thing possible with an operating system like Linux?
15:32:32
beach
I kind of knew that, because I am a member of the program committee. But where did you see it?
16:11:33
beach
Not for the language part. Only for things like page layout, bibliography style, etc.
16:35:10
froggey
beach: (commenting on something from yesterday) Mezzano has enough hand-written assembly to run, I don't like to add assembly functions without good reason
16:35:48
froggey
as an example, making the compiler emit all the code for apply instead of having a single assembly function implement it ends up being a negative. functions end up being bloated by redundant copies of it and it causes a bit of a slowdown