It made me think about meeting Dave Ungar at the first SNAPL. He made it *real* clear that this was still an animating philosophy for him. To him, it was a moral issue: screw all these nitpicky, overbearing languages that squash creativity and subjugate humans to what the machine wants! Performance is our problem (PL/compiler people’s); it’s unseemly to foist it onto everyday programmers.

@adrian this is something Kent Dybvig always used to emphasize, too -- it's the compiler writer's job to suffer an arbitrary amount if it makes life even marginally easier for the programmer

@lindsey [growing dominoes meme]
smallest domino: “the greatest good for the greatest number”
largest domino: compiler writers do not deserve to be happy