From: Jeffrey Jacobs
Subject: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <5084@well.UUCP>
In <·····@utah-cs.UUCP>, my good friend Stan Shebs writes:

>Jacobs must be angling for DoD money or something.  I don't think I've ever
>heard anybody, not in the pay of the DoD, say anything good about Ada...
>Tony Hoare's Turing lecture certainly had some critical remarks, to the
>effect that we risk missiles hitting our own cities by using Ada.
>(I don't know what he thinks about CL.)

As usual, Stan ignores what I say in favor of his own strawman.  The process
and thought that went into designing Ada resulted in a much better language
than CL.  Ada has much better import/export/package facilities, better
typing facilities and a much more coherent syntax.  I am talking about
*quality* of the final language.

As to missiles hitting our cities, I often think that the best hope for survival
of the human race is the fact that a lot of this stuff probably won't work
if it's ever really used.

>>It should
>>be embarassing to everybody in the field that most shells and tools are
>>no longer written in LISP.

>It *is* embarassing, but CL is not the reason;  the same thing would have
>happened if (for instance) Scheme had been standardized on.But enough of this >random flaming; let's get to the meat of one of my arguments.

I disagree; I also cover this topic in the upcoming March issue of AI Expert
in an article entitled "Quo Vadis, Lisp?"  We can cover this when that appears.

>>CL is a nightmare; it has effectively killed LISP development in this
>>country.

>You're going to need some facts to back up that assertion.  I see plenty
>of Lisp work going on.

Ok!  Let's look at the facts; I hope that some of the rest of the net will contribute
information on whatever they are doing.  Let's also keep "Lisp work"
confined to development and implementation of Common Lisp, *not*
applications, editors or what have you.

I would appreciate any corrections or contradictions to the following.
Rumors are clearly identified as such.

Commercial:

1  There are only two CL vendors selling CL implementations for multiple standard
architectures, Lucid and Franz.  Estimated number of copies sold by each
is ~2,000, for a total of 4,000.

2.  One major vendor for MS-DOS, Gold Hill.  Number of copies sold unknown,
but of the (nearly) Steele Complete 286/386 versions, probably under 3,500.
Several minor vendors selling incomplete subsets.

Franz/Coral only true Common Lisp for Macs.

Out of the three mentioned above, only Franz is profitable;  Gold Hill
is (rumored) to be close to self supporting, depending on how you
look at it.

3.  DEC continues development of it's own VAX-Lisp; virtually all other
hardware vendors have abandoned or are planning on abandoning internal
development in favor of OEM'ing from Franz or Lucid.  This includes
HP (Rumor).

4.  Lisp Machines Inc. is history.

5.  Symbolics is in deep yogurt, losing money, laying off people, unable
to issue more stock and firing its Chief Financial Officer.  Rumor has it
that they are madly trying to develop a 68020 version.

6.  Xerox Common Lisp.  MIA (Missing In Action).  Apparently still
not ready to release.  **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon
CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture
running one of the above.  (Repeat;  **rumor**).

Universities:

1.  NIL, featured prominently on the cover of Steele, was stillborn.  MIT,
the birthplace of Lisp, unable to produce a Common Lisp.

2.  CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete
version of CL, aka Spice.  (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20
Common Lisp is.  Charles?)

3.  University of Utah, as of the last time Stan and I went round and round, 
still only had a subset of Common Lisp.  By Stan's own words, an
incomplete implementation is "broken" :-).

Are there any Universities seriously working on full scale,
Steele-complete CL implementations?  If so, let's hear about them.
(There should be adequate funding guaranteed so that these
implementations stand a reasonable chance of being 
"Steele-complete").

>I place the blame on lazy and timid Lisp implementors who forgo 
>optimizations because "they would compromise Lisp tradition", and 
>companies who get away with 
>selling shoddy systems because there is little or no competitition.

Gee, whatever happened to blaming it on the failure of hardware to keep
pace?  Of course, we are all awaiting Stan's version that will blow
all the lazy implementors away, and sweep the world.

Did you ever stop to consider that there  is so little competition because
there is so little demand?

 Jeffrey M. Jacobs
 CONSART Systems Inc.
 Technical and Managerial Consultants
 P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
 (213)376-3802
 CIS:75076,2603
 BIX:jeffjacobs
 USENET: ·······@well.UUCP

From: Christopher Dollin
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <1350008@otter.hple.hp.com>
/ otter:comp.lang.lisp / ·······@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) /  4:39 am  Jan 27, 1988 /

In <·····@utah-cs.UUCP>, my good friend Stan Shebs writes:

>Jacobs must be angling for DoD money or something.  I don't think I've ever
>heard anybody, not in the pay of the DoD, say anything good about Ada...
>Tony Hoare's Turing lecture certainly had some critical remarks, to the
>effect that we risk missiles hitting our own cities by using Ada.
>(I don't know what he thinks about CL.)

As usual, Stan ignores what I say in favor of his own strawman.  The process
and thought that went into designing Ada resulted in a much better language
than CL.  Ada has much better import/export/package facilities, better
typing facilities and a much more coherent syntax.  I am talking about
*quality* of the final language.

As to missiles hitting our cities, I often think that the best hope for survival
of the human race is the fact that a lot of this stuff probably won't work
if it's ever really used.

>>It should
>>be embarassing to everybody in the field that most shells and tools are
>>no longer written in LISP.

>It *is* embarassing, but CL is not the reason;  the same thing would have
>happened if (for instance) Scheme had been standardized on.But enough of this >random flaming; let's get to the meat of one of my arguments.

I disagree; I also cover this topic in the upcoming March issue of AI Expert
in an article entitled "Quo Vadis, Lisp?"  We can cover this when that appears.

>>CL is a nightmare; it has effectively killed LISP development in this
>>country.

>You're going to need some facts to back up that assertion.  I see plenty
>of Lisp work going on.

Ok!  Let's look at the facts; I hope that some of the rest of the net will contribute
information on whatever they are doing.  Let's also keep "Lisp work"
confined to development and implementation of Common Lisp, *not*
applications, editors or what have you.

I would appreciate any corrections or contradictions to the following.
Rumors are clearly identified as such.

Commercial:

1  There are only two CL vendors selling CL implementations for multiple standard
architectures, Lucid and Franz.  Estimated number of copies sold by each
is ~2,000, for a total of 4,000.

2.  One major vendor for MS-DOS, Gold Hill.  Number of copies sold unknown,
but of the (nearly) Steele Complete 286/386 versions, probably under 3,500.
Several minor vendors selling incomplete subsets.

Franz/Coral only true Common Lisp for Macs.

Out of the three mentioned above, only Franz is profitable;  Gold Hill
is (rumored) to be close to self supporting, depending on how you
look at it.

3.  DEC continues development of it's own VAX-Lisp; virtually all other
hardware vendors have abandoned or are planning on abandoning internal
development in favor of OEM'ing from Franz or Lucid.  This includes
HP (Rumor).

4.  Lisp Machines Inc. is history.

5.  Symbolics is in deep yogurt, losing money, laying off people, unable
to issue more stock and firing its Chief Financial Officer.  Rumor has it
that they are madly trying to develop a 68020 version.

6.  Xerox Common Lisp.  MIA (Missing In Action).  Apparently still
not ready to release.  **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon
CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture
running one of the above.  (Repeat;  **rumor**).

Universities:

1.  NIL, featured prominently on the cover of Steele, was stillborn.  MIT,
the birthplace of Lisp, unable to produce a Common Lisp.

2.  CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete
version of CL, aka Spice.  (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20
Common Lisp is.  Charles?)

3.  University of Utah, as of the last time Stan and I went round and round, 
still only had a subset of Common Lisp.  By Stan's own words, an
incomplete implementation is "broken" :-).

Are there any Universities seriously working on full scale,
Steele-complete CL implementations?  If so, let's hear about them.
(There should be adequate funding guaranteed so that these
implementations stand a reasonable chance of being 
"Steele-complete").

>I place the blame on lazy and timid Lisp implementors who forgo 
>optimizations because "they would compromise Lisp tradition", and 
>companies who get away with 
>selling shoddy systems because there is little or no competitition.

Gee, whatever happened to blaming it on the failure of hardware to keep
pace?  Of course, we are all awaiting Stan's version that will blow
all the lazy implementors away, and sweep the world.

Did you ever stop to consider that there  is so little competition because
there is so little demand?

 Jeffrey M. Jacobs
 CONSART Systems Inc.
 Technical and Managerial Consultants
 P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
 (213)376-3802
 CIS:75076,2603
 BIX:jeffjacobs
 USENET: ·······@well.UUCP
----------
From: Christopher Dollin
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <1350009@otter.hple.hp.com>
Re: University implementations of Common Lisp ...

Sussex University in Britain include Common Lisp as part of the Poplog
environment. Although Poplog is SOLD by Systems Designers, it is BUILT at
Sussex.

Poplog V13 includes a pretty damn near complete implementation of VL, sorry,
CL. Not bad going for one main implementor plus the Poplog VM genius in a
couple of years ...

Poplog includes an integrated editor and the core language (Pop11) with
Prolog and Common Lisp. All these languages can talk to each other. Standard 
ML is also available.

Regards,
Kers                                    | "Why Lisp if you can talk Poperly?"
From: blumenthal @ home with the armadillos
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <10228@ut-sally.UUCP>
[Gee, you guys are fun to watch.]

>>2.  CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete
>>version of CL, aka Spice.  (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20
>>Are there any Universities seriously working on full scale,
>>Steele-complete CL implementations?
>
>UMass Amherst has got a distributed Common Lisp project going, and I think
>Rochester has something underway for the Butterfly.

Can anyone say "Kyoto?"  Complete, fairly portable, and you can't beat 
the price.  

Take care,
brad

Brad Blumenthal            ARPA: ····@pheasant.cs.utexas.edu
                           UUCP: {seismo, harvard}!ut-sally!pheasant!brad
From: Charles Hedrick
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <675@athos.rutgers.edu>
>2.  CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete
>version of CL, aka Spice.  (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20
>Common Lisp is.  Charles?)

DEC-20 Common Lisp is a port of CMU's Spice.  It is as complete as
Spice was at the time it was done.  The part we did is complete, but
that is low-level functions and the compiler.  I was never able to be
sure how complete the stuff we took from CMU was, as we were depending
upon the CL validation suite to do final checkout.  As far as I can
tell, it never materialized.  Had the DEC-20 survived, we would have
kept manpower on the project and made sure it was complete, but it
didn't seem worth doing.  (DEC-20 CL was really built for the Jupiter.
There was at least one design tradeoff made on the basis of
preliminary instruction timings, and it was built to take advantage of
the bigger virtual address space simply by changing some contants.
Once the Jupiter was cancelled, our enthusiasm waned rapidly.  In my
view, the existing model isn't quite powerful enough for CL.  Typical
configurations just don't have enough memory to deal with a number of
users running CL, though one or two people can run it without trouble.
I understand it was actually used for coursework at Stanford.  We
never had that much courage.)

Certainly all the low-level primitives, compiler technology, etc., is
there, so it's just a matter of updating the Lisp system code to the
newest version of the CMU stuff.  

It is quite true that a complete CL is beyond the ability of the
typical university hacker to produce.  However if you start with Spice
Lisp, producing a CL is probably not much worse than any other Lisp
dialect.  It's certainly within the realm of a team with a few good
people in it.  It doesn't need anything like the resources that were
used to produce some recent big systems, e.g. X.  However if you had
to do it from scratch (i.e. without Spice Lisp), and you had to do it
within a couple of years (Spice Lisp took far longer to produce
something complete - which is why so many CL's based on Spice Lisp
started out as half-baked), it would probably require a team that only
a couple of big-name institutions could put together.  It's a fact of
life that software is getting bigger.  It's hard for one guy to
produce a major package these days (except if he's RMS).
From: Richard A. O'Keefe
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <588@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
In article <····@well.UUCP>, ·······@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:
> Commercial:
> 
> 1  There are only two CL vendors selling CL implementations for multiple standard
> architectures, Lucid and Franz.  Estimated number of copies sold by each
> is ~2,000, for a total of 4,000.
> 
There is a system called PopLog which was produced at the University of
Sussex, in the UK.  This is is Pop11 + Prolog + CL, all intercallable.
I have not seen a recent version, so can't comment on the completeness
of their Common Lisp, but I expect good things from them (for example,
their Prolog was slow, but very close to the de-facto "DEC-10" standard).
PopLog has oodles of on-line help and source-code libraries.
Systems Designers Ltd market it commercially in the UK; they have a
US distributor but I don't remember the name.
Last I heard they had sold a couple of hundred copies, but that was
a few years ago.
There were VAX/VMS, VAX/Unix, various M680x0, and SUN versions
being distributed, and other versions were in the works.

> 6.  Xerox Common Lisp.  MIA (Missing In Action).  Apparently still
> not ready to release.  **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon
> CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture
> running one of the above.  (Repeat;  **rumor**).
> 
XCL is not missing in action.  I've got it.  Works fine, as far as I
can tell.  Ask for the Lyric release.  I haven't tried everything in
The Book, but everything I've tried was there, and they provide the
"proposed" error handling system (errors are objects).

The rumour I've heard is that Xerox will port THEIR OWN software to
some standard hardware (which needn't entail abandoning their own hardware)
I have not heard this myself from anyone at Xerox, neither have I asked.
I could tell you about some other rumours I've heard, but what's the
point?  They're probably all wrong.

I'm not sure that the number of Common Lisp vendors (whether Mr Jacobs
has the right number or not) tells us much about what Common Lisp has
done to the Lisp market.  How many commercial vendors were there BEFORE?
Surely the troubles of LMI and Symbolics cannot be blamed on Common Lisp;
CL is too similar to ZetaLisp for that!
From: Gary Fritz
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <6950006@hpfclp.HP.COM>
> >3.  DEC continues development of it's [sic] own VAX-Lisp; virtually all
> >other hardware vendors have abandoned or are planning on abandoning internal
> >development in favor of OEM'ing from Franz or Lucid.  This includes
> >HP (Rumor).
> 
> Not a rumor; it's true.  The hardware vendors fell into the trap of assuming
> that good software is easy to build - a common misconception of hardware
> types who "once wrote a 200-line Fortran program".  In fact, hardware vendors
> have *rarely* succeeded in producing good software of *any* sort, but it
> doesn't ever seem to stop them from trying...

This is an unfair statement.  HP Common Lisp was developed by a group
of extremely qualified software engineers, many with extensive previous
experience in building Lisps.  Granted, the implementation had some
problems, but those were due more to historical/etc. reasons than to
"hardware types who once wrote a 200 line FORTRAN program".  Just because
someone works for a company that produces hardware, that doesn't make him/her
a software illiterate.  "Hardware" companies hire software types too, ya know.

JJacobs, there are reasons for "abandoning" proprietary CL's other than
a supposedly brain-damaged lanaguge spec.  As an example, there were *no*
acceptable CL's to pick up when HP began developing its own.  However, there
are now some obvious choices of "de facto" standard CL's (such as Lucid),
and it doesn't make sense to expend engineering effort on maintaining a
non-mainstream language.  Lucid has many engineers devoted to the care,
feeding, and improvement of their CL, and it makes sense to join their effort.

Gary Fritz
From: Arun Welch
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <5493@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
>6.  Xerox Common Lisp.  MIA (Missing In Action).  Apparently still
>not ready to release.  **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon
>CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture
>running one of the above.  (Repeat;  **rumor**).


MIA? Xerox Common Lisp was released in August.  By now, it's even been
released in Europe to Rank Xerox sites. Xerox and Sun announced in
October that they are moving all Xerox products off of Xerox's custom
hardware to Suns SPARC architecture. This includes XDE, the XNS
services, Xerox Lisp, Viewpoint, and so on.  This information was
rather widely publicised, it's not a rumor.

>1.  NIL, featured prominently on the cover of Steele, was stillborn.  MIT,
>the birthplace of Lisp, unable to produce a Common Lisp.

I don't know what you mean by stillborn. I used it for about 2 years,
and I know of other people in other parts of the country who did too,
both at educational institutions as well as commercial sites.

>2.  CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete
>version of CL, aka Spice.  (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20
>Common Lisp is.  Charles?)

I've used Hedrick's DEC-20 CL, and haven't found any defficiencies. If
it's missing something, it's not in the documentation as being
missing, nor is it a major enough thing to be critical.

Amazingly enough, you're also missing a rather large contender in the
field: TI. They're doing quite well selling their Explorrer II's and
LX's, and are rumored to be about to announce a plug-in board for the
Mac II which is about half way between the Explorer I and the Explorer
II in performance. Not to mention that their lisp chip is gonna have
all kinds of interesting applications in other parts of their
organisation. In fact, last I heard, Explorer II's were back-ordered a
couple of months.  To find TI missing from your list is pretty
amazing. Or is it because you can't find anything bad to say about
them?

Yet another vendor missing from your list is HP. I haven't used HP's
CL, so I can't comment on it.

And another vendor out there is Ibuki, who are marketing a supported,
enhanced version of KCL. Another case of my not having used it enough
to comment on it.

And another vendor missing from your list is BBN ACI, who report quite
good sales of their Butterfly SCheme, and will probably report even
better sales of Butterfly Lisp (which is being developed on HP
Bobcats, so HP must have a pretty good Lisp...). Yes, BBN ACI recently
re-organised, but that was to accomodate expansion, not retrenching
for a loss of market. Butterfly Lisp is waiting on Mach to come out on
the Butterfly, so it's not expected out until June. 

Lisp development seems to be going along pretty well in a number of
organisations. How else can you explain the emergence of CLOS and CLX,
one as an actual standard, and the other which will probably develop
into a de facto standard, with people already writing toolkit's for
both of them (as evidenced by TI's CLUE and Xerox's PCL-Environment).

There seems to be a lot missing from your flame, not to mention some
disinformation... I hope your article in AI Expert doesn't reflect
more of the same...

...arun

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Arun Welch
Lisp Systems Programmer, Lab For AI Research, Ohio State University
·····@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
From: Darrel VanBuer
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Date: 
Message-ID: <10@exec.sm.unisys.com>
In article <····@well.UUCP> ·······@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:
>In <·····@utah-cs.UUCP>, my good friend Stan Shebs writes:
>
>6.  Xerox Common Lisp.  MIA (Missing In Action).  Apparently still
>not ready to release.  **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon
>CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture
>running one of the above.  (Repeat;  **rumor**).
>
Xerox Common Lisp is out, and has been for a few months.  Deliveries
have been slow because of the magnitude of changes, and Xerox has
apparently trying to minimize the number of customers on the steep
part of the learning curve at one time.  Beta testing went faster than
planned because of the relative solidity of the job.  The main
weakness of what was delivered in the first release is that many of the
Interlisp tools don't grok common lisp yet (e.g. Masterscope).  It
does seem that Sun and Xerox have agreed in principle to migrate Xerox
software to Sun hardware (with Sun committed to support for XNS), but
indications are in products for a couple of years out.  I guess Xerox
finally decided their application customer base is too small to
support competitive hardware development (the Star/Viewpoint text
processing software is also migrating.  A year was a long time to be
overdue, though.