following up on speed

[Ken Anderson <address@hidden>]

Simon Cozens spoke before I did in the "Worse is better panel".
One of the last things he said was something like "why does the better way 
have to be slower?".

I didn't have an immediate comeback, even though I've studied profiling and 
the relative performance of Lisp and C programs, 
http://openmap.bbn.com/~kanderso/performance/

The Peter Norvig pages i recently used in a reply to this list contains 
some benchmark results which contained a pointer to a larger set of results:
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/

Perhaps we can use this data to get a relative sense of the performance of 
the language we've been talking about.  I realize how hard this is, so i'm 
not trying to pick on any language here.

I think this is a good topic for this panel, because performance was a big 
issue for Dick Gabriel.  He and others made substantial improvements to the 
performance of Lisp and other other languages.  But he also said that 
performance wasn't the only issue, or the most important one.  This could 
explain why lightweight languages are so important, they focus on important 
issues.

k