[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[Daniel Weinreb]

Alexander Repenning wrote:
> is still mostly true but as I am tracking the speed of JavaScript 
> versus Common Lisp I can see a scary performance cross over point in 
> the near future (months). Already, in some of our benchmarks 
> JavaScript running in OS X Chrome is getting very close (10% gap) to 
> Clozure Common Lisp. Why is that? Common Lisp has gone STALE. 
I can't argue with that, but there's another thing:

In his keynote speech at SPLASH/OOPSLA, Allan Wirf-Brocks gave
a history of dynamic languages and the phases they went through.
He says that in the current phase, the importance of Javascript
is so high that a lot of the effort on dynamic languages in
general is going to Javascript.  Also, the people with expertise
in such languages and how to implement them properly is
also going to Javascript.  So some of what is going on here
isn't only specific to Common Lisp.

As more and more applications are written to run inside
browsers, there is more and more motivation to be able
to provide an environment in the browser that is
conducive to writing more sophisticated applications.
Making Javascript faster is one of the elements.

-- Dan