This essay will not focus on Lisp's powerful abstractions but on another practical concern of all programmers : performance, specifically compared with C.
I had typed a reasonably long criticism, but Safari crashed and I lost it (and I thought it had become safe to actually start writing in browsers.)<p>Anyway:
The graph is useless (don't use a log scale, please choose a better range)<p>The code is somewhat frightening (C implementation totally naïve, and I'm not much of a Lisper, but the nesting level there scares me)<p><i>It's 'bizarre' syntax, it's alleged ability to ... facing it's almost vertical cliff face of ...</i> (I hope English isn't your native language; you should be using its, the possessive form)<p><i>Lisp being an implementation of Lambda Calculus</i> (what?)<p><i>and a functional language</i> (no?)<p><i>To sum it all up : The small factor in difference between C and Lisp really does not matter. As the Lisp compilers improve in the code that they generate over the coming years the gap will close without much work on the Lisp hacker's part.</i><p>Conclusion: [some banality]<p>Now, pretend I had written the above more eloquently and inefficiently, and I'll pretend Safari didn't die. Oh well :(
Lisp is not, by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, fast. The key is that most applications aren't CPU bound anymore.<p>If speed is that important, use foreign function calls (or, better yet, Haskell).<p>And I say this as a long time CL coder who has written several highly perfomant lisp libraries. See, for example, polygon.lisp, color.lisp, and bitmap.lisp at <a href="http://github.com/smanek/ga/tree/master" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/smanek/ga/tree/master</a>. In order to get decent performance you have to give up many of CL's advantages (not using half of CLOS's features, providing type hints, bit twiddling, imperative style, etc).
"Such abstractions simply don't exist in most other languages, specifically the imperitave kind."<p>wrong<p><a href="http://iolanguage.com/" rel="nofollow">http://iolanguage.com/</a><p>Also, Lisps are imperative. setf, setq and the like.
And now, the rest of the story.<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hlls/i_want_to_believe_in_lisp_vs_c_performance/c09b77i" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hlls/i_want_to...</a>