Re: Are we close to a Lisp boom ?

Andrew Reilly wrote:
That's the logic that's currently driving the mania for "virtual
machines" and "hypervisors": your operating system might crash, and that
might take down your other applications. Clearly there's a continuum of
risk versus performance that can be traded off in many ways. I'm quite
happy to run all of my applications under one FreeBSD image: it's as
solid as a rock.

Sure but you are misrepresenting the benefits of both VMs and virtualized
OSs.

By far the biggest benefit of virtualization is the ability to migrate
virtual machines between physical machines and duplicate them.
XenEnterprise makes this extremely easy and it is incredibly useful in a
variety of industrial settings (not least banks). For example, one coder
can build a development environment with the appropriate tools in it and
then replicate that VM for the other coders to use without them having to
worry about incompatible versions and so forth.

By far the biggest benefit of .NET as a VM is its robust concurrent GC and
common language run-time that allow programs to be written in multiple
languages using only high-level interop. OCaml, Haskell, Lisp and Scheme
all lack such a foundation and, consequently, trying to use them to build
anything substantial is just building on sand. That is even more important
in the multicore era, where Java has become the only language outside
Microsoft Windows that is capable of exploiting multicores effectively.

Similarly, back when I used emacs, I was more than
happy to have the rapid start-up of emacsclient, which connected to an
existing instance, rather then wait through a start-from-scratch.
There's a quality issue too, of course. I've never had emacs or gnome-
terminal crash on me, but Firfox does it often enough.

Emacs is very poor quality software, IMHO. It is unstable, crashing all the
time, and incredibly user unfriendly from a user interface perspective.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
.

Relevant Pages

  • Compiler positions available for week ending January 13
    ... Scholarships for PhD study in Informatics@Edinburgh ... UK students ... Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications ... Probabilistic Approaches to Natural Language Generation ...
    (comp.compilers)
  • Re: Programmers unpaid overtime.
    ... whichever language the help is required in. ... > or trolls, like Richard, who have a following of other trolls. ... > Quite a lot of running applications are in VB-4 and are extended using ... > Goose, cudgel thy brains. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: A tale of two laptops (was): Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most gabby of us all?
    ... ...Don't write applications programs... ... Machine language or, for the effete, Assembler language ... we had software which would read the code and gen flowcharts. ... Planners make up schedules, Managers ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: An Observation
    ... It is systems programming in support of a class of ... for applications. ... of attention to *human* communication. ... While TeX has largely replaced troff in scientific publishing, it's recognizably a member of the same family of markup languages. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: checking if NUMERIC
    ... applications run on a dedicated PC - most involve servers). ... One point you seem to be missing is that COBOL is not the "best" language for ... Perhaps COBOL compilers should instantiate the nanny/Dashwood option which ... I very rarely bother responding to challenge/response systems, ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)