I was going to call this one "No blasters!  No blasters!" but it didn't make much sense, and two Star Wars titles in a row is too much for even a gigantic nerd like me to stomach.  Not that the current title is all that great...fuck it.

Anyway, whilst eating lunch with my pal B. Larsen* he mentioned the quintessential programming language shoot-out, which I had not seen in quite some time, and is worth taking a look at if you haven't seen it in a while.  It includes many hip new languages like Erlang and Ruby, and is quite detailed in how the languages are  benchmarked.

Among the most interesting pieces of information are the outliers.  Everyone knows C is fast.  But Haskell (a favorite of Larsen's) and Steel Bank Common Lisp (my langue de plume) both are much faster than I might have guessed.  And look at Ruby and PHP!  Ruby is 54 times slower than C!**  All this definitely makes  for some interesting discussion.  One cannot help but wonder why so many startups seem to favor such slow languages...




* His blog will likely never be updated again.  November!  Unbelievable.

** Yes, I know Ruby 2.0 will be much, much faster.  Even so, a great deal of web startups use Ruby NOW.  I question their judgment. 

 
 

I kid.  Some of my best friends are Germans!*

Weitz is mostly cool because of cl-who and hunchentoot.  As I have let slip before whilst rambling about the internets, my friend John Watson and I are hard at work on a fun project involving Common Lisp.  While he fiddles with memcached, I am working on the beginnings of our site, which we plan to build using Common Lisp to dynamically generate HTML and skin it using CSS to make it look all pretty and WEB 2.0**.

This bold plan would be a hell of a lot harder if not for Weitz, and his wonderful libraries hunchentoot and cl-who.  Weitz, self-effacing devil that he is, is quick to admit that many other Lisp markup languages exist.  And they do.  But few work so seamlessly with his major accomplishment, hunchentoot!

hunchentoot is a hilariously named*** Common Lisp webserver.  Currently running on its own right now, it is serving me the very first test pages for our site.  I am extraordinarily pleased with it so far, and cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is a pretty short update for today (lacking even a lolcat!) because I have an electrical engineering exam to study for and some work to do for my day job.  I may throw some more up later tonight, but most likely I will just collapse somewhere.  The lazy is strong with this one.







*  Patently untrue.  I only know one, whom I met twice.  He dates my girlfriend's best friend.  Regardless, he is awesome, and has raised my opinion of Germans in general.

**  Rounded corners.  Lots of rounded corners.

***  I am forbidden from talking about it in public, due to the odd glances I have started to garner:  "Something smells fishy with hunchentoot!"

 
 

10/24/07

Most days I get little time to work on stuff related to my own startup, but today I have devoted some time to figuring out what kind of database we might use.  After reading several scholarly articles and checking the opinions of some people whose programming ability I respect, I have come to the conclusion that PostgreSQL is the cat's ass.

http://www.postgresql.org

An interesting sidenote is the Common Lisp interface:

http://common-lisp.net/project/pg/

So in conclusion, if you would also like to be as gangster as I am (though not as gangster as, say, Hell Rell), I suggest you use PostgreSQL.