Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference |
Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference |
My Emacs session has been running for two weeks and I have 560 open buffers, which amounts to a memory usage of 620 MB. I don't think it's unreasonable for most every interactive operation to be instant.
I don't blame Lisp for the slowness, except insofar as the language promotes the use of data structures like simple lists that eventually create bottlenecks, and that the Elisp implementation is not very fast compared to something like SBCL.
disclosure: I'm currently writing a small node server in emacs. I'm happy with both as they are very responsive, but emacs does chug occasionally like a bro at a frat house.
Other language communities make a point of being self-contained and consider it a failure if you need to use a native method, but as ever, it's about the right tool for the job.
There are too many choices and everything is fragmented to the point that it's hard to find any common ground between ruby developers, js / jquery developers, old school c++ hackers, bash-scripting sysadmins and even perl gurus.
Emacs definitely isn't the most popular editor I've ever used though. When someone asks me why I use it, I usually give a short one minute demo where I macro a bunch of changes, show git integration, multiple buffers, and use some pre/post save hooks. Few editors come close to matching Emacs feature set.
If you just need to buy 2 servers instead of 1 then sure, yeah, developer time is more expensive than hardware.
I know of only a few that need 10...
But it's not just servers. You are up against physical availability of stuff, and stuff gets exponentially more expensive as you approach the limit. A programmer who is wasteful of memory on a single box will eventually reach a point where you simply can't buy more, you will have to rewrite the app to run on more machines, for example. At the small scale, sure, programmer time is expensive. But on an industrial scale, programmers are pretty cheap compared to say "building and operating an entire new datacentre".
And computers are cheap, regardless of how many you have. You say a datacenter with 50K servers is expensive, but imagine how bad would it be to maintain a building with 50K programmers...