Common Lisp as a Scripting Language, 2015 edition
The first computer I used had about 2KB of RAM. The other day, I compiled a 2KB Common Lisp script into a 16MB executable to get its startup (and total execution) time down from 2s to subjectively instantaneous — and that didn't bother me the least, for my current computer has 8GB of working memory and over 100GB of persistent memory. But it did bother me that it didn't bother me, for 16MB was also the memory on the first computer in which I felt I wasn't RAM-starved: I could run an X server, an Emacs editor and a shell terminal simultaneously without swapping! Now an entire comfortable software development universe could be casually wasted over a stupid optimization — that I have to care about because software systems still suck. And to imagine that before sentientkind reaches its malthusian future, code bumming will have become a popular activity again...
( Read more...Collapse )
