Lightweight Languages Workshop (DDJ Article)

[Rob Myers <address@hidden>]

I found this on Dr. Dobb's current Website:

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=2287/ddj0202a/0202a.htm

It menions Dylan in passing, along with Jonathan Bacharach's Proto.

After reporting complaints about languages such as Java and Perl 6 
re-inventing the wheel, the article mentions a talk by Paul Graham:

"...one of his requirements is that the language be fast. One of his 
colleagues had remarked that with Lisp, it was hard to tell whether the 
code was expensive. Graham responded that this was really the role of a 
profiler, not the language itself. However, to be complete, Arc would 
have to have a profiler..."

IIRC this isn't the case with modern Lisp if-you-know-what-you're-doing, 
but it is made explicit with Dylan's type constraints and sealed/open 
dynamism control. Fun-Dev's optimization syntax colouring makes this 
easy to learn and manage. Dylan's built-in support for optimization 
still seems to be an advanced feature and, despite predictions, has not 
lost its relevance for the simple reason that demand for ever increasing 
processor power has more than kept up with the supply.

- Rob.