Hm, it's also because we use dynamic languages with shitty implementations. JavaScript has been optimized to hell, it has a proper JIT compiler, and it's extremely fast, about half the speed of C in many cases. Python and Ruby are inexcusably slow in comparison. We have the technology to make them fast, but the language implementations were born in the 1990s, at a time where everybody thought single-core performance would always double every 18 months. It's this kind of "performance doesn't matter" mentality that lead to poor implementations and a huge waste of CPU cycles. IMO, those languages will inevitably be displaced for performance reasons. It will take time, but it's inevitable.
I do like LISP, don't get me wrong, but the lack of speed and modern multicore support (actors and transparent parallelization like in Erlang/Elixir) has always put me off.
Maybe I am getting old but I started to be skeptical about language features and power if at the end I can't make it max all CPU cores and use async I/O everywhere.
I think we all could use a bit more pragmatism. I for one don't like Rust but I am relentlessly investing in mastering it because I do need low-level statically typed and compiled language and I still have PTSD from C/C++.
F.ex. I loved Racket. It is an amazing language and extremely well-crafted and thought out. But, call me when they have Erlang/Elixir's processes (actors) and preemptive scheduling.
Common Lisp with SBCL compiles to very efficient code, it can be comparable to C, for example. For multicore support, I'm sure there are good libraries available - lparallel maybe? (https://lparallel.org/overview/)
What don't you like about Rust? I haven't done any of it in anger but I did Advent of Code in it this year and have been having a great time. I miss some stuff like Python's generators and some of the crates I've found (like ndarray and euclid for example) have felt a bit incomplete but overall the language and standard library feel very well thought out and enjoyable to use.
There is a lot of obscure error messages surrounding lifetimes and borrowing. Most of the time I would have immediately fixed my problem by being told "you are returning a reference to the insides of a temporary structure, either clone it or make the structure's lifetime `static`" but no, I have to get an error about not implementing a certain trait with anonymous type parameter... :(
I'm getting there though. Rust is an acquired taste, plus I am very much sold on its premise and love the results. The journey, not so much. But I want to have that extremely powerful tool in my toolbelt so I am muscling though the learning process.
Thanks for this reminder, will do as well! Overwhelmingly I've actually been really impressed with the quality of the compiler diagnostics— 9 times out of 10 the prompt is telling me exactly what I need to do. I will try to do a better job of keeping track of the occasional bad/baffling ones.
