Is Sector Lisp Small Only Due To Assembler Tricks?

2025-04-14

Is Sector Lisp small only due to assembler tricks?

Nope.

If it was only assembler tricks, then we would see a 436 byte Lua. Lua is 1,250x larger than Sector Lisp. Rust is 750,000x larger than Sector Lisp.

SL avoids all forms of mutation, e.g. heaps, assignment, and applies that attitude to everything including GC. That's a big memetic difference from what GPLs (general purpose languages) try to do.

Trying to build code using GPLs results in bloat.

I claim that it is better to build many tiny languages, then bolt them together. E.g. SL to compute something, another language to store the results (mutation), .... Then, find a way to bolt them all together into a whole. GC by ABC method or Biblical Flood method (Sector Lisp, Unix, resp.). How to bolt them together? Surprise! 0D and the best programming language.

Is it hard to use many programming languages? You still have to think and understand what’s inside a program. Code still contains many paradigms. We have become jaded due to the failure of GPLs to give us multiple syntaxes for multiple paradigms. We have become jaded by the fact that we are encouraged to think that important paradigms must be conflated with cheap syntax.

Paradigms are important. Syntax is cheap.

See Also

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