It's a funny state of affairs when Emacs folks cite *performance* as a reason for using a browser written in elisp! http://t.co/TgZOfN75tu
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Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)?
I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions.
(I wanted Emacs in this case.)
I've heard of 'blub languages', where you don't realise that other languages have better abstractions until you've experienced them.
I think the same thing happens with individual features. I've seen several C++ folks miss variadic generics in Rust, but I've not written enough C++ to feel it.
It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U
Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?