From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Subject: Re: Lisp as glue language?
Date: 2000/11/22
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* glauber <theglauber@my-deja.com>
| To be semi-serious again, you probably don't want Common Lisp or Perl as a
| glue language.

  I actually want Common Lisp as the glue language, too.

| You want something small(er) and simple(r) like TCL or Scheme
| (depending on whether you like ()s or not).

  No, I really want a real programming language as my glue language, but
  I also want to compile the glue into something that has very, very
  little overhead.  Today's glue languages are _extremely_ wasteful and
  betray an arrogance towards hardware that I find staggeringly stupid.
  Just because we have had 1000 times more computing power in recent
  years is not good reason to _spend_ 1000 times the computer resources
  on our tasks, too.  That's just telling the hardware people that the
  harder they work, the softer the software people get.

| Of course one can always say that if you were programming in Lisp to
| start with, you woudn't need to use an additional scripting language.

  That, too, but the whole idea of "scripting" is just plain wrong to
  begin with.

  To zoom out a bit, I want intralanguage glue, not interlanguage glue.
  I want a "glue language" that produces source code in other languages
  that interfaces between a pair of languages.  With all the dumb-ass
  languages out there, the work required to make things interoperate is
  just too high, leading to an explosion in the need for glue, which it
  is the wrong solution to provide.  The right solution is to write
  tools that produce source code.  This is completely foreign to people
  who manually write all their code in dumb-ass languages, but those who
  have ever seen a real, code-generating Lisp macro should know better.

  When I was only an egg, building language tools that read more complex
  _languages_ than today's crop of silliness (like XML) were the order
  of the day.  YACC is not called Yet Another Compiler Compiler for no
  reason.  Such tools were manifold, but now there is no development of
  new tools, except for stuff that generates HTML, of course, most of
  which is _amazingly_ unintelligent and nearly completely ignorant of
  past wisdom and knowledge.

#:Erik
-- 
  ALGORITHM: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite
  number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation.
  ALGOREISM: a procedure for solving an electoral problem in a finite
  number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation.