There was a time when you could whip out a parser in lex and yacc, stitch together a naive VM and throw it over the wall and you’d have a new scripting language. Those days are coming to a close and in a few years (if not months) you won’t be able get traction with anything unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc.
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so what? Joe's noting that previously a set of tools helped actual humans turn out better tools by wrestling down the complexity of building state machines by hand and handling complex text matches.
Is it not then simply progress to assume that a new generation of tools will allow the same man-month (or so) of effort to create somewhat more sophisticated tools? If lex and yacc are a "real man"'s toolchain, then why aren't LLVM and/or Parrot?
If Joe really wants to win this argument he should make it on the basis of the complexity of *libraries*, not of runtimes. Alas, as with his anachronistic arguments about XHTML purity and such, he's just waving to the water under the bridge as it inevitably flows out to sea. I for one am glad that Joe can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Regards
Alex Russell - 9th June 2008 08:29 - #
ugg. wrong reference. I had confused Elliotte Rusty Harold with Joe Gregario on the XHTML front. Consider that part of my comment rescinded with much embarrassment.
The rest stands ;-)
Alex Russell - 9th June 2008 08:33 - #