“The Lisp language provides great generality by default but this comes at a grave cost in terms of performance. In order to get within an order of magnitude of the performance of C++, OCaml or SML, it is necessary to litter the source code with type declarations. In contrast, this process is automated by Stalin, ocamlopt, MLton and SML/NJ. The shortest Lisp implementation demonstrates the abysmal performance offered by the Lisp language which is also coupled with considerable verbosity: four OCaml and one Standard ML implementations are both shorter and much faster than the shortest Lisp.”
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The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.