On 9/4/08, John Dorsey
I'm no master either, but I'd argue that if we promise new programmers that they don't need to care about strictness, we thereby ensure that default laziness is treacherous.
A year or two ago, ISTR that *most* of the newbie-generated traffic in the cafe was about atrocious performance of naive programs due to strict/lazy concerns. I think it was scaring people away.
I think it's debatable what the various causality relationships might be here.
Adding strictness can improve asymptotic space performance, as an example. Is there a reason to think this won't always be true? Honest question, since I don't know nearly enough about strictness analysis to guess how good it'll be some day.
Adding strictness can also worsen asymptotic space (and time) performance. That's one reason why we use a lazy language at all. Strictness analysis is an approximation to the problem of determining what parts of a program can be evaluated strictly without changing their meaning, because if we had a perfect solution to that problem, we could solve the halting problem. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier * http://cs.pdx.edu/~tjc * Often in error, never in doubt "There are no difficult problems, just unfortunate notations." -- Alfonso Gracia-Saz