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All our experience with Lisp tells us that it is a fluid language that allows
rapid prototyping. The Dylan designers are trying to preserve that as well as
producing tight and fast object code.
[Therefore] Dylan goes a step beyond the languages of the past in allowing
explicit control over what should be left open and what should be sealed, so
that run-time efficiency can be gradually added in as the system moves from
development mode to production mode and back to maintenance mode.
To build complex systems requires powerful tools. The power is distributed
between the language, the designer/programmer and the development and
run-time systems. It is not possible for truly powerful tools to be extremely
simple. Difficult problems require ingenious and non-trivial solutions. Such
is the complexity of the world.
It is only after years of experience of many people that we can see our way
clear to provide this new mix of flexibility and efficiency. That is where new
languages come from. Looking at the history of programming languages, or
for that matter, of the tools of any technical discipline,
there is only one thing that we can be sure of – new languages, techniques,
etc., will come along with total inevitability. It is only a matter of what they
turn out to be in each era and how long they survive until something even
more useful appears.
Bob Futrelle
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(I wear sandals a lot because I was so impressed by John McCarthy's
penchant for them when he was a faculty member and I was an
undergraduate back at MIT in the late 1950s -- such are the things that stick
in ones mind. Sandals are healthy for the feet, too. At that time, the
machine I used for my work had the car and cdr operations in hardware -- it
was an IBM 704 mainframe, the same one that McCarthy was using.)
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