[plt-scheme] xxx chooses MzScheme as preferred language

From: Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum at cs.indiana.edu)
Date: Sat Jun 3 00:48:52 EDT 2006

On Jun 2, 2006, at 11:26 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>
> On Jun 2, 2006, at 12:34 AM, Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:
>
>> Which restaurant serves the *most delicious* food?
>>
>> Which restaurant is the *most popular*? (i.e. serving most cows per 
>> capita)
>
> Interesting comparison, but I find it misleading. Here is how
> I and I think most of us are thinking of it:
>
> * Are Schumacher and his car the best engineered and fastest race car 
> team?
>
> * Is it as good for family travel as a Lexus with built-in navigation?
>
> [I intentionally rewrote the questions not to parallel yours and 
> Joe's.]

Yes, Schumacher builds fast cars unsuitable for use as a family sedan 
and
a Lexus does not belong in a Formula 1 world championship.  It's also 
true
that Chez Panisse (pun not intended) and McDonald's are not really in 
the
same business.  But back to Scheme implementations ...

Do you see any *technical* reason for why we cannot have a user-friendly
and, at the same time, super fast implementation?  I honestly don't.

I look at PLT's work and I admire how much effort was put in the 
frontend,
the user interface, and the whole experience (modulo the speed thingy).

I look at Chez and just can't get over the effort that was put in making
it the finest implementation (modulo the missing human interface 
thingy).

Can't there be an implementation that is both at the same time?  I mean,
there is no magic in making good human interfaces as DrScheme already
demonstrates.  Making fast optimizing compilers is not magical either
since every single aspect of Chez Scheme (its runtime architecture, the
optimizations it performs, its register allocator, its garbage 
collector,
etc.) has been described in details in the literature.

Aziz,,,



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