Re: The myth of fingerprints, er, no, garbage collectors

… this sounds very much like what they call, today, Data Science…

I had to look it up to understand how Data Science is a Science. And I see now, they decided to combine knowledge of statistics with the chores of data reformatting. This is a totally new field, probably invented around 2010 or so.

I had the experience of seeing the invention of Computer Science in the early 70’s. I wonder if the industry just immediately accepted the new graduates of Data Science? or did they resist until they could see the benefits? I saw a lot of early resistance against Computer Science until the 1980’s.

Our of my own ignorance I had to stop and look in the mirror one day and say “Self, stop ridiculing Pascal! You don’t even know anything about it. Go learn!”. And so I did, and I eventually landed on Lisp.

Lisp has such minimal, non-noisy, syntax, that it gets out of the way and allows you to focus on the algorithm. Contrast with JSON and Rust… Good luck if you can still remember that you were working on an algorithm by the time you wade through all the scaffolding and syntactic noise.



> On Jun 25, 2026, at 11:00, Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot ie) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 25 Jun 2026, at 18:17, Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at tfeb dot org) <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> You can also watch GC time grow as it has to copy more: (smash (expt 10 9) 1000) makes lists which can grow to 1000 elts: GC now is well over 0.5% of the time. Keeping lists of a million elements results in the GC taking 10% of the runtime.
> 
> I had a similar discovery a couple days ago — I was processing an oversized csv of 100M entries weighing over 6GB (don’t ask) instantiating a struct for each line. After that the runtime started freezing for many seconds during GC and for some reason was unable to remove obsolete structures anymore once I was done with them, so it kept freezing each time GC ran. I ended up reworking the code into using typed arrays instead.
> 
> GC is indeed a nice convenience but it seems like it has its limits, at one stage you will be forced to write your code in a way that avoids littering as much as possible.
> 
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