[Openmcl-devel] Speed, compilers and multi-core processors

[Justin Grant]

> Someone could define a version of Common Lisp with these characteristics...
>>
>>
... hopefully that never happens !

Patronizing assumptions on the part of language implementors have mostly
been avoided in CL up until now.
There's a reason hackers choose CL to design/implement their systems : they
are willing to take responsibility for their own code. For the opposite case
think Java. Java's StringBuffer class came about due to flawed assumptions
that had to be handled after the fact. The world that is modeled in software
is not as cut and dried as we would all like it to be : resources are not
infinite.

That being said, I really do like some of the features that I've seen in
Clojure (speaking from actual experience using Clojure and CL). Forcing
immutable data structures on users to simplify the language implementation
issues or to make concurrent programming 'easier' is neither of them. The
one thing I would change in Clojure is this very thing. Even Haskell has
it's monads and Lisp allows for functional and imperative styles to be
mixed.

There may be an important lesson here ...
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