On the latest ACM TechNews newsletter, there was a reference to an InfoWorld story on the virtues of Dynamic Languages. The case is being made that the industry to a still greater extent turn to dynamic languages to tap into improved productivity.

I am a great beliver in the promise of dynamic languages and I am here not just thinking of Lisp but dynamic languages in general including Ruby and Python that are among the ones mentioned in the article. In fact I am convinced that the next big thing in programming languages (whenever that will materialise itself) will be a dynamic language.

Continuing through various links in the article I arrived at two other interesting sites: Tiobe which keeps score on language popularity based on web search engine statistics and the Language Shootout which maintains an impressive list of benchmarks implemented in various langauges.

Obviously such things should not be overrated in importance (as the saying goes: there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks/statistics) but it is quite funny to look for Lisp there and compare to something like Erlang which seems to create quite a buzz, also i Lisp circles. Erlang actually fares a lot worse (according to the aforementioned websites) than I had imagined. In the Tiobe popularity index, the Lisp and scheme group is currently ranked 17 while Erlang is in the group of rank 51-100. Even if the entry named "CL" relates to a breakout of Common Lisp from the Lisp/Scheme grouping (which I do not think judging from the explanations), it is still at position 37 and thus before Erlang. In the all languages shootout SBCL is at ratio 1.9 compared to C where Erlangs best ratio is 4.2.

Quote of the day

American author Kurt Vonnegut died recently. From the danish blog (in danish) Harddisken I have scooped up the following quote:

"If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts."

Tags: lisp, programming