
Worse Is Better - icey
http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
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hga
Thia is Richard Gabriel's full treatment of the thesis over a decade or so,
well worth a look if you've found the first paper to be of interest.

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Aegean
For the part: "Why C instead of Lisp? Because worse is better." Well, C has a
distinct position among many other languages such that constructs in C map
_one-to-one_ to the way the cpu executes. That is exactly why C. Not because
it is worse.

I've heard of the term _lisp machine_ but I must admit I am not much informed
on details. I would bet that if those took off as real hardware, lisp as a
language would take off together with them.

~~~
eru
> Well, C has a distinct position among many other languages such that
> constructs in C map one-to-one to the way the cpu executes. That is exactly
> why C.

If computers were Von-Neumann-Machines, this would be true. Modern computers
do a lot behind the scenes, that you have to take into account for performance
reasoning. E.g. caches. C's concepts also do not play well with concurrency.

C has it's value. It's just not that easy to reason.

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brisance
Joel Spolsky wrote about this some time ago.
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html>

