Programming Language History [was: F/OS & the blind]

[Bill Freeman]

Bill McGonigle writes:
 >       "Comparing Lisp and Python and throwing out the top and
 >        bottom two, we find Python is 3 to 85 times slower than
 >        Lisp -- about the same as Perl, but much slower than
 >        Java or Lisp. Lisp is about twice as fast as Java."
 > 
 > So, Norvig is saying the Python interpreter is what is killing speed, 
 > and, using the above mentioned python2lisp code we should be able to 
 > run lisp-compiled Python scripts at constant time with compiled C++.

	I'm not confident in his speed comparisons.  Looking at his
sample program written in both lisp and python, I'm pretty sure that
most python programmers wouldn't approach the underlying problem in
that way.  If that's true of his other tests, his python (and perhaps
perl) speeds may be artificially depressed.

							Bill