Why does the Interpreter Pattern suck?

Question

In Steve Yegge's review of Design Patterns, he calls the Interpreter Pattern an "in-joke". He goes on to talk about how the perception of compilers have changed, yet how interpreted languages are still s*** on, although I can't see how this ties into the pattern.

Anyone want to enlighten this ignorant student?

Answer 1

That was irony :) Everybody loves interpreted languages nowadays but 10 years earlier people just thought they are too slow for anything practical. Much like today most of people thinks about static vs. dynamic typing.

Answer 2

The INTERPRETER pattern sucks because it's a codification of Greenspun's tenth rule:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

This was stated in 1993. A modern addendum might include C++ and Java.