JWZ, on Garbage Collection
jwz.org
jwz.org
Maybe I'm just too involved with the community, but Lispers tend to make some of the greatest rants, aphorisms, epigrams and one-liners out of any other hacker group I know, even when they're downright hostile :-)
(At one job, I wrote an infinite loop background process that did nothing but allocate memory, and ran it in the test environment of the Smalltalk trading application I was maintaining. Unless you did certain intensive operations, you couldn't tell the difference. The GC handled it without a hiccup. I could've put that into production, and almost no one would've had any idea it was there.)
The thing is, I am punctilious about labeling the various parts of my arguments: this is an incontrovertible fact, this is strongly supported by evidence, this is an assertion, and that is a wild-assed guess.
A certain kind of engineering-oriented mind (a) wants to be fair in not claiming too much; (b) wants to have a productive debate that can actually move forward.
The ironic thing about me being taken to task is that I provided far more evidence in my posts than most people in that forum (a town social / political email list), but because most participants conflated their assertions with their defensible fact-based points, they were never called on it, but because I was more intellectually honest, I was perceived as asserting facts more often, even though I did it less.
So, my point is this:
I applaud JWZ for labeling his assertions as such; agree with him or disagree with him, at least he's playing the intellectual game of debate on a fair and level playing field, and even helpfully labelled the stronger and weaker points of his argument. Win or lose, it's a lot more possible to have a constructive conversation.
It's amazing that the BDW GC works as well as it does. I hack on Guile, and we're actually switching to use it.
In fact many would argue that for small, short-lived objects that the Sun GC outperforms malloc/free. This is a topic of debate, obviously.
I still think that this is only the case for a tiny fraction of all the code out there (Java is f*ing fast these days), and will become less and less true with each passing year.
Of course, there are apps that require manual memory management, but they are becoming few and far between.
GC just abets to care less about memory management in applications.
Are you just indirectly polling if there is still controversy about GC?
There is, apparently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585094
Don't hate the playa, hate the game! ;-)
DNA is a weird spot. It's a great space. JWZ obviously tried to recreate a subculture that was never hugely popular but sort of maybe had its heyday and died in the 90s. The sort of only-in-SF cyber-industrial-goth thing. Front242, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire remixes. Every guy looks like Robert Smith with a top hat, wearable computer, and zombie boots. Proto-burning-man meets blade runner sort of thing.
It's definitely not a favorite for hipsters. It only comes close on mashup night, and even those "hipsters" are all 38 years old. The whole hipster in SF thing is bit of a hoax. All those hipsters are really web designers who went to Stanford, which wasn't really hip ever, but certainly hasn't been hip since 1999. What is now known as hipster in SF was called "yuppie" 20 years ago. It's just different brands of shoes and alcohol - even the tight pants remain the same.
But I'll try and be more clear next time.