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Re: Ousterhout article on scripting applies to scheme

To: scsh@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Ousterhout article on scripting applies to scheme
From: mikemac@engr.sgi.com (Mike McDonald)
Date: 27 Mar 1997 23:36:42 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, CA
In article <E7q6Bo.BBG@world.std.com>,
        wware@world.std.com (Will Ware) writes:
> Scott Schwartz (schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu.NO-SPAM) wrote:
>: shriram@ollie.cs.rice.edu (Shriram Krishnamurthi) writes:
>: | I think Ousterhout's notion of a glue language is essentially bogus.
>: Given the number of success stories he cites, that's hard to
>: understand.
> 
> I have only skimmed the article so far, but one thing struck me immediately.
> At one point he gives an "anecdotal" table where something is programmed
> originally in C or C++, at enormous expense in programmer hours, and then
> re-implemented in Tcl/Perl/whatever in ten or fifteen minutes. It would be
> interesting to see if the same skew existed for programs that were written
> in scripting languages (or for that matter, Lisp or Scheme or Python) first,
> and then re-implemented in C or C++. It's hard to believe the ratios would
> be as large.

  That table is worthless. You can construct another table with the exact
opposite results, ie programs that took forever to write in Perl/TCL and took
hardly anytime to reimplement in C/C++ (not that I'm a fan of C/C++.). It's
almost always easier/quicker to reimplement something than it was the
first time.

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@engr.sgi.com

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