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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."
I don't care if LISP runs 500 times as fast as Java. It has a massively restricted API. People don't base their language choice on speed anymore. FORTRAN is still twice as fast as C, but everyone still uses C, for two reasons: FORTRAN is harder to learn, and C has more libraries.
Java's great strength is that it has a huge set of APIs, all in a unified form, making programming a less repetitive and painful experience. Java is for people who understand that recoding the same search tree three hundred times is not going to make them richer, cooler or a better programmer. LISP is for people with time to waste.
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
This is quite an interesting study. I use java professionally for most things that I do (I have also used C, Objective-C and a few others in the past). I have had to work with lisp a bit. Of course I took a lisp oriented AI class in school, but since then I have also had to do some porting from lisp to Java! Perhaps it was just a factor of the people who developed the lisp code, but I found it incredibly difficult to read - and my complaint wasn't with the nesting of parentheses. It wasn't strongly typed (is there such a lisp?) and the singular type of syntax (lists) make many aspects of the code difficult to unravel. That said, there are some things I really like about lisp, in particular its dynamic nature where you can build lisp functions at runtime and execute them at runtime. Sometimes I really wish I could do this easily with Java (its possible to do, just a huge pain in the butt). I think the real issue right now is that Java (and C++) are used in the "real world", whereas lisp is mostly isolated to academia. The article point this out. I've used Java for huge projects because it is no longer considered a risky language by large organizations. For whatever reason, lisp has not developed such a reputation. Does lisp have application servers? Does lisp has db connectivity? Does lisp have CORBA bindings? Does lisp have asynchronous messaging? Does lisp have naming and directory bindings? Does lisp have web page templating functionality? I'm sure all that stuff could be built, but I doubt most of it exists right now. Therefore, lisp is not acceptable for corporate use at this time.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Its interesting to see the results of a short study, even though the author admits to the flaw in his methodolody (primarily the subjects were self-chosen). Still, I don't think that's a fatal flaw, and I think his results do have some validity.
However, I think the author misses a more important issue: development involving a single programmer for a relatively small task isn't the point for most organizations. Maintainability and a large pool of potential developers (for example) are a significant factor in deciding what language to use. LISP is a fabulous language, but try to find 10 programmers at a reasonable price in the next 2 weeks. Good luck.
Also, while initial development time is important, typically testing/debug cycles are the costly part of implementation, so that's what should weigh on your mind as the area that the most gains can be made. Further, large projects are collaborative efforts, so the objects and libraries available for a particular language plays a role in how quickly you can produce quality code.
As an aside, it would've been interesting to see the same development done with experienced Visual Basic programmer. My guess is he/she would have the lowest development cycle, and yet it wouldn't be my first choice for a large scale development project (although at the risk of being flamed, its not a bad language for just banging out a quick set of tools for my own use).
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
Computer languages tend to develop in response to specific needs, and most programmers will probably end up learning 5-10 languages over the course of their career. It would be helpful to have a discussion of the appropriate roles for certain computer languages, since I'm not sure any computer languages is better than any other.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
However there is more data now, as, Prechelt itself widdened the study, and published in 2000 An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl (a detailed technical report is here).
If you look, from the developer point of view, Python and Perl work times are similar to those of Lisp, along with program sizes.
Of course, from the speed point of view, in the test, none of the scripting language could compete with Lisp.
Anyway some articles by Prechelt are interesting too (as many other research papers ; found via citeseer for instance)
I have written 2 Lisp books for Springer-Verlag and 4 Java books, so you bet that I have an opinion on my two favorite languages.
First, given free choice, I would use Common LISP for most of my devlopment work. Common LISP has a huge library and is a very stable language. Although I prefer Xanalys LispWorks, there are also good free Common LISP systems.
Java is also a great language, mainly because of the awesome class libraries and the J2EE framework (I am biased here because I am just finishing up writing a J2EE book).
Peter Norvig once made a great comment on Java and Lisp (roughly quoting him): Java is only half as good as Lisp for AI but that is good enough.
Anyway, I find that both Java and Common LISP are very efficient environments to code in. I only use Java for my work because that is what my customers want.
BTW, I have a new free web book on Java and AI on my web site - help yourself!
Best regards,
Mark
-- www.markwatson.com -- Open Source and Content
In this LinuxWorld interview look what Stroustrup is hoping to someday have in the C++ standard for libraries. It's a joke, almost all of those features are already in Java. As Stroustrup says, a standard GUI framework is not "politically feasible".
Now go listen to what Linux Torvalds is saying about what he finds to be the most exciting thing to happen to Linux the past year. Hint, it's not the completion of the kernel 2.4.x, it's KDE. The foundation of KDE's success is the triumph of Qt as the de facto standard that a large community has embraced to build an entire reimplementation of end user applications.
To fill the void of a standard GUI framework for C++, Microsoft has dictated a set of de facto standards for Windows, and Trolltech has successfully pushed Qt as the de facto standard for Linux.
I claim that as a whole the programming community doesn't care whether a standard is de jure or de facto, but they do care that SOME standard exists. When it comes to talking people into making the investment of time and money to learn a platform on which to base their careers, a multitude of incompatible choices is NOT the way to market.
I find talking about LISP as one language compared to Java to be a complete joke. Whose LISP? Scheme? Whose version of Scheme, GNU's Guile? Is the Elisp in Emacs the most widely distributed implementation of LISP? Can Emacs be rewritten using Guile? What is the GUI framework for all of LISP? Anyone come up with a set of LISP APIs that are the equivalent of J2EE or Jini?
I find it extremely disheartening that the same people who can grasp the argument that the value of networks lies in the communication people can do are incapable of applying the same reasoning to programming languages. Is it that hard to read Odlyzko and not see that people just want to do the same thing with programming languages--talk among themselves. The modern paradigm for software where the money is being made is getting things to work with each other. Dinosaur languages that wait around for decades while slow bureaucratic committees create nonsolutions are going to get stomped by faster moving mammals such as Java pushed by single-decision vendors. And so are fragmented languages with a multitude of incompatible and incomplete implementations such as LISP.