My own personal rule on this is to use functional programming whenever possible and let the GC deal with it.
Not much of an excerpt, but it says it all: modern Lisp GCs truly Rock the Casbah, and I myself am on record as denouncing the flipside of this blogcoin, consophobia. Actually, there may be a problem, Dave says "whenever" possible and perhaps then we agree!
But "whenever possible" has a ring to it like "oh, you know, all the time" and I actually had a good reason for not doing that, I just forgot it. Has to do with solar power.
The reason solar power sucks even though there is an overwhelming amount of it is that it is diffuse. Yes, enough sunlight falls on Kansas in a month (I am making this up) to power Earth for a year, but just try to find a solar panel as big as Kansas, never mind deal with the Kansans or the inefficiency of the transmission to Australia. I digress.
The problem with a "Damn the consing! Full molasses ahead!" policy is that when ones application drags to a halt there will not be a bottleneck to fix. There will just be hundreds of places one was too lazy to think about whether one could use the right construct. And correcting them all will be as painful, tedious, dreary, mind-numbing (sound like fun yet?) and thus as bug prone as it would be easy and fun whenever reaching for a list manipulation tool to challenge oneself with, gee, can I cut in the afterburner? Stand back, GC! Captain Destructo is in da house!
That is a practical objection. My ethical objection (viz, hey, learn the language) is not all that far behind: jeez, I am building this list right here in front of my eyes, why am I not using a destructive operation for the next step? Do these same folks all have a copy-n-sort function in their personal toolkits that begins with a copy-list on the sequence to be sorted?
No, they do not. Why not? Hello.
My apps periodically get bogged down. I wait until they do and then dive in for what I like to call Speed Week after a regular TV extravaganza on vehicular racing. Normally this turns up interesting algorithmic gaffes I do not feel too bad about but one time the smoking gun was the most innocuous little needlessly copying statement you can imagine write at the center of the heaviest hitter bit of code you can imagine. This is pretty much the opposite of the solar power argument -- there was just one little guy to track down -- but without the code profiler offered by AllegroC I am not sure how long it would have taken to find that.
And now I come back to the main point: er, exactly how hard is it to know when one can use destructive list operations? So why not use them? Only one excuse comes to mind (fear) but always copying is not even a clear win (ie, it can totally suck at times) so.... learn the language?
If I was going to cut the Copying Cowards some slack I would say, shucks, not everybody writes insanely intense tight loops. But then I remember a point I made in FNO/1: we get noobs all the time struggling with slow code because of excess copying. Perhaps complex applications and tight loops are orthogonal?
I say learn the damn language.
