[toronto-lisp] Fwd: [tpm] [Fwd: The Upcoming Dynamic Language Smack Down]

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 9:40 PM, Vish Singh <vishvajitsingh at gmail.com> wrote:
> That is one unlikely montage :)
>
> Yes, I agreed to do the panel. I've been to a couple of GTALUG
> meetings before and I think it will be a lot of fun, talking about
> Lisp and also learning about the other languages being presented.
> Also, it may draw more people into our club.
>
> If anyone would like to provide suggestions for how to reply to the
> points above, they would be quite welcome. Most of them seem
> straightforward, but I don't know quite what I'd say about "large
> volumes of code" or "huge amounts of data".

Note that I'm the one to blame for virtually all of the questions!  :-).

For "large code" I'd point at 4 Common Lisp answers, implementation
dependent, but commonly available strategies:
a) Tree shakers can shatter off unused code and construct loadable binaries.
b) Bytecode compiled code is compact & quick to load
c) Code compiled to machine code is less compact, but more heavily optimized
d) Memory images can be dumped for fast reload  (clisp -M, anyone?)

For "huge data" I suggest thinking about how you do equivalents to
database access.  There certainly are libraries allowing access to
DBMSes and DBM-ish stuff.  If there are other answers commonly used
for serializing objects, that's good to comment on.

The questions were intended to be pretty open ended.  Don't worry
about perfect answers everywhere - there's not going to be time to
explain every little detail, not with 7 people on the panel.  Your
share of the time isn't a LONG time.

Rather, having generally credible answers can encourage people to dig further.
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