Performance is not everything

Henrik zodiachus at gmail.com
Fri Aug 17 01:23:47 PDT 2007


I found this article on wikipedia today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISAL

"SISAL (Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language) is a general-purpose single assignment functional programming language with strict semantics, implicit parallelism, and efficient array handling."

On top of automatic parallelism and whatnot, the article claims that it outperforms C. Sounds great! So is this the Next Big Language(tm)? Nope. It's been around since 1986. 

It reminded me that performance must only be a small part of whether a language is widely adopted or not. So what determines whether people start using a language? Is it only a matter of inertia, tradition, habit and prior investments? Or are there more complex considerations to be taken into considerations?

Why haven't we been writing applications and games in SISAL the last 21 years? In ten years, will people look back at D and ask themselves the same thing or is D:s future different? If so, why?



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