RE: how small is lightweight?

["Anton van Straaten" <address@hidden>]

Steve Dekorte wrote:
> If there a place we could draw a line between light weight and
> not-light weight languages on this?

The LL1 CFP (http://ll1.ai.mit.edu/cfp.html) said:

	The term "lightweight" refers not to actual functionality,
	but to the idea that these languages are easy to acquire,
	learn, and use.

It sounds as though you're talking about a different definition of light
weight.

By the LL1 definition, most of the languages on your list are lightweight,
although one could argue about Java (the language, not the VM); and I might
quibble about Perl, which really has a surprising amount of stuff to acquire
& learn, not all easy.

If you're focusing on VMs, then the LL1 sense of lightweight becomes rather
meaningless, for VMs that can host more than one language.  The Java VM
hosts plenty of lightweight languages, for example, even if you don't count
the Java language as one of them.

I think it's been observed here before that we shouldn't be surprised to see
lightweight languages being heavy in terms of resource consumption, since
making a language easy for the human isn't necessarily "easy" for the
computer.  Perhaps the Tcl VM size proves that... :)

Anton