Well, it's about the same impact as the Python interpreter overall, which I have explicitly timed to be 20%.

Isn't Python about an order of magnitude slower than decent compiled C?

Since we know how Python hits and others have demonstrated that Python is either dead even or slightly slower than Java

With a JITter? The benchmarks I've seen indicate that JITted Java is usually at least a couple times faster than Python. But I don't have any interest in either of them (outside this class), so I don't follow the stats closely.

Still, I can't believe that an actual interpreter (not a JITter or something similar) is only a 20% hit. The tightest interpreter I've played with was running at about a half-dozen real machine instructions and an indirect jump per interpreted bytecode, just on bare arithmetic ops. No type-checking, no memory management beyond the hardware stack, pre-cached binaries, etc; everything I could to think of to make it fast. All considered the jump-per-bytecode alone was probably worth more than 20% overhead. I'd be amazed if Python was lighter-weight than that.

What annoys me about scheme and lisp are not that they are functional languages, really.

What annoys me is that people who didn't know Lisp started calling it a functional language years ago, and then when other people figured out that it isn't, they acted as though Lisp was broken. I've /never/ heard an Lisper claim that Lisp was anything like a 'real' functional language, and there's no tremendous enthusiasm for more pure functional techniques in Lisp community, AFAICT. It's just the functional programming people looking for something to complain about, the same way Lispers complain about SML's type system or Haskell's monads (when they can figure out what the heck they are).

What gets me is that I often see )))))))))))) at the end of a function declaration.

That would be a bit excessive. The most convoluted function I could come with in the last couple minutes was terminated by only six parens, and it was /way/ beyond anything you'd normally see from even a mediocre Lisp programmer. You'd run out of horizontal screen before you could get up to that many levels of nesting. Although, if you're talking about Scheme, I could believe it ;-)

Yet, among many that is perfectly acceptable style for lispish languages.

Well, yeah. Anyone who wrote Lisp like a Java programmer would need to be shot, too.

I tend to hold what I deem commonly accepted abuses of a language against the language.

I don't mean to sound condescending (honestly), but that's the sort of comment often made about Lisp by people who don't understand it.

You earn a cookie for even knowing that CLU and Icon exist.

Do I get another one for being tempted to simulate CLU in Java by writing everything using static methods? Mmmmm, consistency....

Unix invariably has more languages and has the crown for being the birthplace of the single most evil language ever

JCL was born on OS/360, wasn't it? Or do you mean another most evil language (there are quite a few these days)?

Try Intercal.

No way. Programming languages are bad enough without being purposely designed to infuriate. My brief affair with the Brain**** satisfied any masochistic desires I had. The only good thing in Intercal is COME FROM, and I can get that in Fortran if I need it (you'd be amazed what snuck into those compilers ;-).

OTOH, I write machine code in binary. Go figure.

Intercal is enough to turn anyone into a gun-toting maniac - just like its author.

Too late, already there. Well, except the maniac part. Mostly.