Worse Is Better

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43 points·icey··5 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

Lisp machines were big in the 80s. They died with the AI boom. They're not going to take off again any time soon because Lisp as a platform is no longer nearly as important as it once was. The ability to target Unix/Windows, and the ability to run software to run and interact with software targeting Unix/Windows, is too important to let novel platforms really take off. There are 'Java machines,' for example, which are commercially viable so I understand, but how common are they?

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

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