Lisp as an Alternative to Java

Joseph Dale writes "Lisp as an Alternative to Java is a detailed and well-reasoned study comparing Lisp to Java and C++ in terms of execution time, memory consumption, and developer effort. The author, Erann Gat, was the principal software architect for the Mars Science Microrover, the prototype for the Mars Pathfinder rover."

Comments

Re:Interesting, but flawed?

[nels_tomlinson]

Some of thing things I believe are more important when thinking about a programming language:

1) Amenable to use by team of programmers
2) Viability over a period of time (5-10 years).
3) Large developer base
4) Cross platform - not because I think cross-platform is a good thing by itself; rather, I think its important to avoid being locked-in to a single hardware or Operating System vendor.
5) Mature IDE, debugging tools, and compilers.
6) Wide applicability

1) Is lisp less amenable to use by a team? Can't you implement one object while I implement another? I'm asking because I don't know; all my programming has been for my own research.

2) Lisp has been around since the 1950's, in one form or another. I find that I can read lisp code from the Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, which originated in 1965. Our kids will probably still be able to in another 30 years.

3) How large is large enough? Is: "language of choice for 10^7 illiterate script-kiddies" a stronger recommendation than: "there are a sufficient number of competent programmers who are proficient in the language and familiar with the problem domain"? Notice that second statement is probably not true for any of the languages discussed, for most problem domains.

4) Except for the Microsoft offerings, pretty much everything is cross platform. Think gcc and cmucl, for easy examples.

5) I really don't know what an IDE is. I gather it is something other than emacs, since emacs supports nearly every language, some wonderfully well (try ESS for R). I really can't comment on this one at all; perhaps someone else could?
As for mature compilers, again, I think all of the languages mentioned so far are in fair shape there. Java and c can both use the same back end in gcc, and so does gcl.

6) Technically, all the languages mentioned are Turing-complete ... But wide applicability means being suitable, instead of merely capable. I am not familiar with java and c++, but lisp and c (and Fortran) seem to be equally capable for the bits of number crunching I do. Lisp is wonderfully more flexible, and the debug/wish-i'd-done-it-differently/change it/debug/repeat cycle seems a good deal shorter in Lisp than the other two, for me at least.

After going over the above, it looks to me as if personal choice and the resources immediately at hand are really the only reasons to pick lisp over c over c++ over java over lisp.