[plt-scheme] xxx chooses MzScheme as preferred language

On 6/2/06, Abdulaziz Ghuloum <aghuloum at cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
> People writing web-based applications and related stuff don't
> care either since the bottleneck for these applications is usually the
> speed of the network/database/... .

I'll disagree with this, as someone using Scheme for a web
application. Granted, a lot of the slowdown in our Scheme app comes
from geocoding work (say nothing of the pure-Scheme database
implementation a colleague dreamed up), but I'm certainly not happy
with our response times using PLT right now and am expecting a
significant amount of effort to get the app to scale to more than a
handful of users. [If anybody cares, we'll post more on what we've
been doing and some code in the next few months...]

> What remains is perhaps less than 1% of the Schemers who do care about
> performance because their applications demand it.  To be popular, you
> better focus your effort on catering to the needs of 99% of users.

I won't disagree with the foundation of this argument (most users care
about a clean language, etc), but think that speed matters a bit more
than some people seem to think (way more than 1%). If nothing else, I
think the _perception_of slowness is enough to drive away many
potential Scheme users.

In other news: There's an almost identical thread on the Ruby-talk
mailing list, with folks taking almost exactly the same positions as
we've seen in this thread (among others).


Keith