Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?

["João Távora" <joaotavora@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 1:16 PM Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:

> > Or any programming language for that matter, if you know enough
> > machine code.  Or any other programming abstraction I happen not to be
> > familiar with.
>
> I am familiar with machine code.  It is perhaps pertinent to remark that
> modern processors tend to the reduced instruction set model - that the
> complicated "do it in one single complicated instruction" notion doesn't
> help the writing of good compilers, or the running of programs
> efficiently.  I suspect that analagous logic applies to programming
> languages too.

That's a clever and interesting perspective actually, but I would
tend to say no.  Programming languages are still written and read
by humans.  Human brains aren't designed the same way processors
are.  For one they aren't "designed" at all.  And we don't consume
information the same way a metal likes to, we don't unroll loops,
and at least I don't prefetch all of the supermarket shelf when
someone tells me to get olives, etc, etc.  Plus I'm horrible at
parallelism.  And we don't speak with reduced instruction sets,
we have many words with nuanced meanings.

João