Seibel Corollary to Greenspun's 10th
Thursday, December 2, 2004
On c.l.l., Peter Seibel has posted his Corollary to Greenspun's 10th:
"Any sufficently complicated Java program requires a programmable IDE to make up for the half of Common Lisp not implemented in the program itself."Hehe, I can relate to that one. ;-)
Peter is well qualified to make that statement as he is not only writing "the book" on CL programming, but also has an extensive background in Java programming. He was an early engineer at Weblogic and the server architect at a company where they built a transactional message queuing system in Java including their own transactional, persistent store. Peter originally came up with the Corollary during a discussion on the #lisp IRC channel.
For those of you unfamiliar with Greenspun's 10th, it states:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."As to the origin of this quote, Philip Greenspun says:
"I've seen this in .signatures on USENET postings but I can no longer remember where I wrote it originally. On the Squeak discussion group, Vassili Bykov helpfully explained the meaning: 'that complex systems implemented in low-level languages cannot avoid reinventing and/or reimplementing (poorly on both counts) the facilities built into higher-level languages. Like garbage collection in OLE or keyword arguments in X.'"
