From: ···@paradigm.com
Subject: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <2456@paradigm.com>
What is happening in the lisp world?
The two biggest lisp vendors seem to be taking a dive.

(1) a major hardware vendor is shutting down its in-house lisp group.

(2) Symbolics stock closed tue at 13/16, which gives a total market
    value (2.5*10^6 shares) of $2,030,000
    Note: the assets of LMI were sold out of bankrupcy in June of 1987
    for approximately $2,300,000 (inflation adjusted to 1991 dollars).

Of course Xerox got out of the lispmachine gig a while ago.
What is happening at Texas Instruments?

-gjc

From: Kevin Thompson
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <9717@ptolemy-ri.ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov>
In article <····@paradigm.com> ···@paradigm.com writes:
>What is happening in the lisp world?
>The two biggest lisp vendors seem to be taking a dive.

Really?  Symbolics and who??

>(1) a major hardware vendor is shutting down its in-house lisp group.

Anyone care to enligthten those of us who don't know what this means??  Sun?
Dec?

Sorry, just a pretty terse message on your part.  Inquiring minds want to
know.

Kevin Thompson
--
········@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov     NASA-Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
From: Jeffrey Jacobs
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <22601@well.sf.ca.us>
> Symbolics and who?

Texas Instruments is who!

Also, it would appear that Lucid is getting into C++ based on a recent
ad in misc.jobs.offered!

Jeffrey M. Jacobs
ConsArt Systems Inc, Technology & Management Consulting
P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
voice: (213)376-3802, E-Mail: ·········@COMPUSERVE.COM
From: Barry Margolin
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1991Jan13.175820.12780@Think.COM>
In article <·····@well.sf.ca.us> ·······@well.sf.ca.us (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:
>Also, it would appear that Lucid is getting into C++ based on a recent
>ad in misc.jobs.offered!

"Lucid Moments", a marketing newsletter sent to Lucid customers, mentioned
that Lucid recently acquired a company that makes C/C++ compilers.  Sorry,
I don't remember the name of the company they bought.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

······@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar
From: Arun Welch
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <WELCH.91Jan10095911@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu>
>Of course Xerox got out of the lispmachine gig a while ago.

Xerox might be out of the machine gig, but their software platform
(Medley) is still on the market, sold/supported by Venue, and in fact
a lot faster on stock hardware. And some of us are glad for that...:-).

But, to go back to the original question, I think the waters are
muddied a tad by the fact that Lisp is still pretty strong outside the
US, and the external markets haven't crested the wave yet, it seems.
I've also seen a couple job offers for Lispers on misc.jobs.offered,
mostly looking for CLOS hackers these days, and the frequency seems to
be the same as it was a couple of years ago. 

...arun
·················@cis.ohio-state.edu :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arun Welch
Lisp Systems Programmer, Lab for AI Research, Ohio State University
·····@cis.ohio-state.edu
From: Jeff Dalton
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <3944@skye.ed.ac.uk>
In article <···················@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu> ·····@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arun Welch) writes:

>But, to go back to the original question, I think the waters are
>muddied a tad by the fact that Lisp is still pretty strong outside the
>US, 

It is?  Where?

>I've also seen a couple job offers for Lispers on misc.jobs.offered,
>mostly looking for CLOS hackers these days, and the frequency seems to
>be the same as it was a couple of years ago. 

That's the "oop" wave (which _hasn't_ crested yet), not the Lisp wave.
From: Harley Davis
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <DAVIS.91Jan23105145@barbes.ilog.fr>
In article <····@skye.ed.ac.uk> ····@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

   In article <···················@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu> ·····@sacral.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arun Welch) writes:

   >But, to go back to the original question, I think the waters are
   >muddied a tad by the fact that Lisp is still pretty strong outside the
   >US, 

   It is?  Where?

France, for example, where Le-Lisp is still becoming more and more
popular.

-- Harley
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
nom: Harley Davis			ILOG S.A.
net: ·····@ilog.fr			2 Avenue Gallie'ni, BP 85
tel: (33 1) 46 63 66 66			94253 Gentilly Cedex, France
From: Jeffrey Jacobs
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <22573@well.sf.ca.us>
> What is happening in the LISP world?

Lack of demand due to Common LISP's enormous size, complexity, resource
requirements, training, etc.

I attended a presentation by Intellicorp on their new PRO-KAPPA product
yesterday.  "Conventional DP and MIS world wasn't willing to buy into
LISP".

For a more detailed "prophecy", see my Brainwaves column in AI Expert,
March 1988.

Common LISP effectively died from obesity.

Jeffrey M. Jacobs
ConsArt Systems Inc, Technology & Management Consulting
P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
voice: (213)376-3802, E-Mail: ·········@COMPUSERVE.COM
From: Scott "TCB" Turner
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <96861@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
>Common LISP effectively died from obesity.

*And* still managed to leave out "neq".

						-- Scott Turner
From: Eliot Handelman
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <5256@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
;>Common LISP effectively died from obesity.
;
;*And* still managed to leave out "neq".

It died because it was linked to AI and that died. The whole beauty of
list processing was that at one time it was seriously believed that 
thought was essentially list processing, and if you toss in recursion
you can accomodate self-consciousness too. A lisp machine was a machine
whose resident language was "the logic of thought." No one believes this
anymore, so lisp semantics have been relativized, and now it's in competition
with much faster languages which have no such pretensions, but which
are computationally equivalent. Still, Lisp is a nice langauge for
big, open-ended explorations into cognitive architectures written by
people who aren't macho about how fast they can feed numbers into
arrays; and interestingly, lisp has acquired a strong foothold in the
technoarts community, of which I'm a member. Lisp still has a distinctivbe
aesthetic feel to it that makes it seem to come closer to a screwball
"language of thought" than C for instance, even if you're only thinking 
about this as history, as a way of life that was more naive and more 
optimistic than we can be about what a brain machine was going to look 
like.
From: Aaron Sloman
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <4178@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
·····@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:

> Path: syma!icdoc!ukc!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!eliot
> Date: 12 Jan 91 08:40:55 GMT
> Sender: ····@idunno.Princeton.EDU
> Organization: Princeton University, New Jersey
>
> ;>Common LISP effectively died from obesity.
> ;
> ;*And* still managed to leave out "neq".
>
> It died because it was linked to AI and that died. The whole beauty of
> list processing was that at one time it was seriously believed that
                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> thought was essentially list processing, and if you toss in recursion
> you can accomodate self-consciousness too. A lisp machine was a machine
> whose resident language was "the logic of thought." No one believes this
> anymore,....

Actually, having been involved with AI since about 1969 I don't
think I've ever met any serious thinker who believed this.

I keep finding people who say AI is dead because the AI people
believed X and X has been proved wrong, when in fact X is so
obviously false that nobody ever would have believed it, except
perhaps a few badly taught students, and people on the fringes
trying to understand a difficult discipline and latching onto
simplified slogans because they couldn't see what was really going
on. (I once read a draft report by a social scientist commenting on
the UK "Alvey" advanced IT program, in which it was claimed that AI
was more or less defined by the use of Lisp. Fortunately, the final
report benefited from some informed criticism.)

All the people I talked to in the AI field in the early days were
very clear that there was a difference between what they were trying
to implement and how they were implementing it, although it was
agreed that sometimes making the distinction was not easy (hence the
occasional confused person who called a program a theory).

Choice of language and data-types was clearly an implementation
detail. For example, things that used to be done with property lists
in the early days are now often done using hash-tables because the
latter are much more efficient than long property lists. Also, some
of the things that lisp-ers do with lists are done in Prolog using
terms.

What many people in AI have believed is that intelligent systems
don't just manipulate vectors or lists but hierarchically structured
representations, i.e. that understanding, perceiving, thinking,
planning, and the like require the ability to cope with things
composed of parts with relationships between them, where the parts
are also composed of parts with relationships, etc. (This belief was
also shared by many linguists).

I don't think anything that has turned up in recent years has
shown that this belief is false.

Of course, the management of hierarchical complexity isn't all there
is to intelligent systems.

Aaron Sloman,
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
Univ of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, England
    EMAIL   ······@cogs.sussex.ac.uk
or:
            ························@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
            ···········································@relay.cs.net
From: Raul Valdes-Perez
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1991Jan14.040307.23404@cs.cmu.edu>
In article <····@syma.sussex.ac.uk> ······@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>All the people I talked to in the AI field in the early days were
>very clear that there was a difference between what they were trying
>to implement and how they were implementing it, although it was
>agreed that sometimes making the distinction was not easy (hence the
>occasional confused person who called a program a theory).

Could Prof. Sloman make clear why computer programs do not merit the status
of theory?  Would he accept a system of differential or difference equations
as a theory?
--
Raul E. Valdes-Perez			······@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science		(412) 268-7698
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
From: Aaron Sloman
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?comp.lang.lisp.3165
Date: 
Message-ID: <4195@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
······@cs.cmu.edu (Raul Valdes-Perez) writes:

> In article <····@syma.sussex.ac.uk> ······@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
> >All the people I talked to in the AI field in the early days were
> >very clear that there was a difference between what they were trying
> >to implement and how they were implementing it, although it was
> >agreed that sometimes making the distinction was not easy (hence the
> >occasional confused person who called a program a theory).
>
> Could Prof. Sloman make clear why computer programs do not merit the status
> of theory?  Would he accept a system of differential or difference equations
> as a theory?

This could take us into a long discussion of issues in the
philosophy of science, about the nature of theories, models,
explanations, etc., which I'd rather not get into and which would
not be appropriate for this news group. But I had in mind only the
relatively simple point that most AI programs that are intended to
model some bit of reality (like many computer models) have a great
deal of detail that is there not because it corresponds to anything
in the thing being modelled but because (a) it is required in order
to get the model going on the particular hardware and software
platform (b) it is required for coping with the artificial data
simulating the real environment and/or (c) it is required for nice
glossy user interfaces for demonstrating the software etc etc.

When this happens it is all too easy for people (including me) to be
unclear about the distinction between those aspects of the program
that are essential to the theory that is being demonstrated and
those that aren't. E.g. think of an AI vision program intended to
model some aspect of human vision, that takes input in the form of a
regular rectangular array: much of the code will be geared to the
structure of that array. Will all the edge-detecting algorithms that
work on the array be part  of the theory  of how  animal visual
systems work,  or will  it be  an implementation detail  providing
input  to some  other part  of  the system that is  intended as  the
real model?  If the  input to  that other part has an "unrealistic:
form because of how it is  derived, does that  mean  that  only
certain aspects  of  the  intermediate mechanisms are intended as
part of the theory? Which aspects? It isn't always easy to be clear
about this. Unfortunately no interesting AI theory about the
workings of the human mind or brain can be expressed in a few simple
equations.

This is closely related to the critique David Marr made of some of
the work in AI in the early 70s, though I think his alternative
approach stressed the study of the nature of abstract problems at
the expense of workable solutions able to cope with real-time
constraints, poor data, malfunctioning sensors, etc. (But lets not
get into that now!)

Aaron Sloman,
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
Univ of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, England
    EMAIL   ······@cogs.sussex.ac.uk
From: Eliot Handelman
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <5332@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
In article <····@syma.sussex.ac.uk> ······@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
······@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:

;> It died because it was linked to AI and that died. The whole beauty of
;> list processing was that at one time it was seriously believed that
;                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
;> thought was essentially list processing, and if you toss in recursion
;> you can accomodate self-consciousness too. A lisp machine was a machine
;> whose resident language was "the logic of thought." No one believes this
;> anymore,....
;
;Actually, having been involved with AI since about 1969 I don't
;think I've ever met any serious thinker who believed this.

I can back that up. 

;I keep finding people who say AI is dead because the AI people
;believed X and X has been proved wrong, when in fact X is so
;obviously false that nobody ever would have believed it, except
;perhaps a few badly taught students, and people on the fringes
;trying to understand a difficult discipline and latching onto
;simplified slogans because they couldn't see what was really going
;on. 

THis isn't a paraphrase of my point, I hope. I claimed that Lisp
is now COMPUTATIONALLY relative, that it does not need to be
identified as THE language of intelligence, artificial or 
otherwise. I did not suggest that AI is dead "because no one believes
that the mind is a list processor any more." The proposition that
list manipulation is intrinsic to thought is not, anyway, "so
obviously false that nobody would ever have believed it." 
It's not that obviously bad a hypothesis to propose that you represent 
lists AS lists, rather than in some other more machine-like idiom, say 
arrays. And this is by no means a banal assertion.


;Choice of language and data-types was clearly an implementation
;detail. 

Today, yes. The question is whether it was in 1969.
From: John Nagle
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <22645@well.sf.ca.us>
     LISP, in its grander forms, was intended to support an environment
in which everything was fluid, in which programs could modify themselves,
examine their own inner workings in a reasonable representation,
and in which a program could create new sections of program in an 
integrated way.  The dream was of programs that used these facilities
to improve themselves.  Lenat's AM and Eurisko actually did so; few
other programs ever did.

     Unfortunately, that didn't seem to lead much of anywhere.

					John Nagle
From: John Nagle
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <22650@well.sf.ca.us>
     Symbolics closed at 7/16 yesterday, down 3/16.  The year's high was 10.,
so the stock has lost 96% of its value in the last year.  The end must be
near.

					John Nagle
From: Kenneth J Meltsner
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <15714@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
In article <·····@well.sf.ca.us>, ·····@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:
|>     Symbolics closed at 7/16 yesterday, down 3/16.  The year's high was 10.,
|>so the stock has lost 96% of its value in the last year.  The end must be
|>near.


Why does everyone assume the problems of the LISP hardware
manufacturers means that LISP is defunct?  I've never used a LISP
machine, but I've had great time using LISP on my Mac, VAX, and
DECStation.  Am I missing some basic rule that says LISP on UNIX
workstations isn't really LISP at all?  Given what I've seen of
Symbolics' equipment, support, and management style, I'm not surprised
they're doing badly, but is everyone else in the same boat?  Are the
software vendors doing as badly?  How stable are Lucid, Franz, etc.?

In a similar vein, I unearthed the 2/87 issue of AI EXPERT describing
LISP and its future.  Too much to type in, but I'll try to find some
choice bits to quote.

===============================================================================
Ken Meltsner                        | ········@crd.ge.com (518) 387-6391
GE Research and Development Center  | Fax:  (518) 387-7495
P.O. Box 8, Room K1/MB207	    | Nothing I say should be attributed
Schenectady, NY 12301               | to my employer, and probably vice-versa
=================Dep't of Materials Science, ACME Looniversity=================
From: Jeffrey Jacobs
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <22800@well.sf.ca.us>
While you're digging thru old AI Experts, grab the March '88 Brainwaves
column...

Jeffrey M. Jacobs
ConsArt Systems Inc, Technology & Management Consulting
P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
voice: (213)376-3802, E-Mail: ·········@COMPUSERVE.COM
From: John Nagle
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <22670@well.sf.ca.us>
     A previous posting indicated that the total market value of Symbolics
was down around $2 million.  This is incorrect; there are about 25 million
shares outstanding, so even at their current penny-stock price of $0.44
per share, it would take about $11 million to buy out the entire company.

     Their numbers for the last few years show a steady decline, losses,
declining book value, declining income, and incipient oblivion.

					John Nagle
From: ···@paradigm.com
Subject: Symbolics stock confusion
Date: 
Message-ID: <2844@paradigm.com>
In article <·····@well.sf.ca.us>, ·····@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:
>      A previous posting indicated that the total market value of Symbolics
> was down around $2 million.  This is incorrect; there are about 25 million
> shares outstanding, so even at their current penny-stock price of $0.44
> per share, it would take about $11 million to buy out the entire company.
> 

They used to have 25 million shares, *BEFORE* the 10/1 reverse stock split.
From: lawrence.g.mayka
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <LGM.91Jan17101158@cbnewsc.ATT.COM>
In article <·····@well.sf.ca.us> ·····@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:
	Symbolics closed at 7/16 yesterday, down 3/16.  The year's high was 10.,
   so the stock has lost 96% of its value in the last year.  The end must be
   near.

Don't speak too soon.  Symbolics has no long-term debt, and has been
profitable for the last two reported quarters (April-June and
July-September of 1990).  It closed Wednesday at 3/4, according to the
Chicago Tribune.


	Lawrence G. Mayka
	AT&T Bell Laboratories
	···@iexist.att.com

Standard disclaimer.
From: kpc
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <KPC00.91Jan17160129@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>
In article <·················@cbnewsc.ATT.COM> ···@cbnewsc.ATT.COM
(lawrence.g.mayka) writes:

   In article <·····@well.sf.ca.us> ·····@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle)
   writes: Symbolics closed at 7/16 yesterday, down 3/16...

   Don't speak too soon.  Symbolics has no long-term debt...

It is odd to see a company seemingly on the brink of obsolescence and
obscurity whose products are coveted by so many.

Several research laboratories use Symbolics' machines, and the loyalty
seems high.  Former users say they'd do anything to be using Symbolics
machines.  Yet we debate how close to bankruptcy the company might be!

I'm about to start using Symbolics' machines, and I look forward to
experiencing what many call an excellent environment.

But I wonder whether the machines will go the way of the horse and
carriage soon.  What happens to the supplies of oats and stirrups and
so on that I will have collected, I wonder?
--
If you do not receive a reply from me, please resend your mail;
occasionally this site's mail gets delayed.

Neither representing any company nor, necessarily, myself.
From: John R. Dudeck
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <2795309d.5117@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
In an article ·····@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) wrote:
>     LISP, in its grander forms, was intended to support an environment
>in which everything was fluid, in which programs could modify themselves,
>examine their own inner workings in a reasonable representation,
>and in which a program could create new sections of program in an 
>integrated way.  The dream was of programs that used these facilities
>to improve themselves.  Lenat's AM and Eurisko actually did so; few
>other programs ever did.
>
>     Unfortunately, that didn't seem to lead much of anywhere.
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I would say "fortunately".  It's hard enough to control complexity when
we are able to analyze and decompose a problem and nail things down 
in the solution as much as possible.  I hope I never have to maintain
a program that is fluid.


-- 
John Dudeck                                        "Communication systems are
·······@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu                              inherently complex".
ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549                                 -- Ron Oliver
From: Richard Harter
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <299@smds.UUCP>
In article <·············@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>, ·······@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck) writes:

: In an article ·····@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) wrote:
: >     LISP, in its grander forms, was intended to support an environment
: >in which everything was fluid, in which programs could modify themselves,
: >examine their own inner workings in a reasonable representation,
: >and in which a program could create new sections of program in an 
: >integrated way.  The dream was of programs that used these facilities
: >to improve themselves.  Lenat's AM and Eurisko actually did so; few
: >other programs ever did.

: >     Unfortunately, that didn't seem to lead much of anywhere.

: I would say "fortunately".  It's hard enough to control complexity when
: we are able to analyze and decompose a problem and nail things down 
: in the solution as much as possible.  I hope I never have to maintain
: a program that is fluid.

You miss the point -- you wouldn't have to maintain such a program; it
would maintain itself.  :-)

But seriously, the objective was to bypass the complexity of program
building by having the self-building programs.  It may be that the ultimate
failure of the early attempts at auto-programming were really due to
not having a built-in understanding of software complexity.
-- 
Richard Harter, Software Maintenance and Development Systems, Inc.
Net address: jjmhome!smds!rh Phone: 508-369-7398 
US Mail: SMDS Inc., PO Box 555, Concord MA 01742
This sentence no verb.  This sentence short.  This signature done.
From: Richard Shapiro
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1991Jan14.141651.12321@arris.com>
In article <····@idunno.Princeton.EDU> ·····@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:
>It died because it was linked to AI and that died. The whole beauty of
>list processing was that at one time it was seriously believed that 
>thought was essentially list processing, and if you toss in recursion
>you can accomodate self-consciousness too. 


I've been a Lisp/AI programmer for the last 10 years or so, and this
is the first time I've ever heard this *very* peculiar argument. Many
AI programmers use Lisp for much simpler reasons:


1) It's the best general purpose programming language for symbolic
computing, and symbolic computing has turned out to be very useful in
AI applications. There are special purpose languages that are better
at symbol manipulation, but of the widely available general languages,
no other one really comes close.

2) The equivalence between program structures and data structures
makes dynamic computation quite straightforward. No other high-level
language offers this.

3) As a side-effect of (1) and (2), it's very easy to write "higher
level" languages based on Lisp (eg rule languages, knowledge rep.
languages, etc).

4) In particular, the higher-level language construct known as
object-oriented programming folds very well into Lisp -- it's a much
better fit than, say, object-oriented C. I assume we all know the
advantages of oop by now...

5) For various reasons, Lisp systems tend to have quite sophisticated
programming environments, and these are essential in the generation of
complex programs (eg AI programs). Symbolics LISPMs are a particularly
good example of this. The increase in productivity is impossible to
overstate.


>A lisp machine was a machine
>whose resident language was "the logic of thought." No one believes this
>anymore, 

I don't think any Lisp programmer ever believed this. Perhaps some
theorist wrote something like this in a journal somewhere. As I say,
I've been working in the field for quite awhile, and I haven't ever
heard any Lisp programmer make this claim, or anything even remotely
like it.

>so lisp semantics have been relativized, and now it's in competition
>with much faster languages which have no such pretensions, but which
>are computationally equivalent. 

"Computation equivalence" is a useless term. FORTRAN is
computationally equivalent. The question is: how easy is it to write
and maintain sophisticated programs? Lisp is still the clear winner
(among readily available languages, at least) in this regard.

As for speed, there are of course certain applications which require
greater speed than any Lisp can offer. I would claim that these
constitute a very small percentage of the kinds of programs Lisp is
generally used to write.

The reason Lisp has not gained even wider acceptance is due more to
institutional and managerial inertia. The people who are in a position
to make the decisions are simply afraid to make the switch from
whatever it is they're used to.
From: Kenneth J Meltsner
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <15657@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
LISP is not dead, despite efforts to kill it by overfeeding it.  The
problem may be that it will never have the wide appeal of an
efficient, system implementation-oriented language like C, or the
history of a language like FORTRAN.

In fact, there may be more LISP users today than ever before.  Look at
systems like GNUEMACS, with its LISP-dialect extension language.  Look
at WINTERP and Scheme, etc.  I recently saw a complete statistics
package written in XLISP for the Mac.  Common LISP may be dropping in
popularity due to its size, but other LISP dialects are doing quite
well.


What does restrict the use of LISP?

(1) Nasty delivery pricing.  I remember the bad old days when you had
to pay Microsoft a chunk of money to distribute programs written using
their compilers.  That changed quickly when microcomputer compiler
vendors managed to make a living without royalty fees.

But the situation is worse than simply the extra cash.  There's
bookkeeping and copy tracking costs to add in as well.  Even if the
price is not bad, the paperwork is one additional burden.

How can LISP vendors make a living?  I don't know.  DEC and Apple
allow you to generate applications without a royalty fee, but they may
be doing this to help sell hardware.  I'd actually suggest *raising*
compiler prices, but eliminating royalty fees for non-commercial use
of the runtime systems.  Or giving away application runtimes, but
charging extra for the tree-shakers and other runtime-development
tools.  LISP vendors attempt to make a living selling razor blades
instead of razors, but this doesn't work if this forces you to spend
all of your time keeping track of where the blades went.

(2) Creeping feature-itis.  LISP gets bigger and bigger, and every new
extension must subsume all previous extension efforts.  I don't want
to start the religious disputes again, but there's always four ways to
do anything in LISP, and perhaps we only need three.

(3) Bad press.  Management types aren't always the brightest folks,
but they have wonderful memories.  And they all remember LISP
machines, LISP-based expert system shells, LISP gurus, etc.  And the
word LISP got associated with "Not suitable for real world"
applications and hardware.  Even if the latest generation of
workstations can run LISP pretty well (and even my Mac runs a decent
version of LISP), they can only remember prima-donna hardware and
software maintenance types, and the incredible prices they charged.
The management types who switched and made a real investment in LISP
got burned badly, and no one appears to be adventurous enough to make
the same mistakes again.

(4) High-priced programmers.  When the LISP craze hit, the market
overheated and anyone with a CS 101 background in LISP got a $5000
raise.  Most of these folks tried to get super-programmer salaries
(based on their mastery of LISP's higher productivity environments),
but barely deserved COBOL wages.


LISP isn't dead.  It's just recuperating from all the hype of the
early '80s. 



--
===============================================================================
Ken Meltsner                        | ········@crd.ge.com (518) 387-6391
GE Research and Development Center  | Fax:  (518) 387-7495
P.O. Box 8, Room K1/MB207	    | Nothing I say should be attributed
Schenectady, NY 12301               | to my employer, and probably vice-versa
=================Dep't of Materials Science, ACME Looniversity=================
From: Marty Hall
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1991Jan14.171959.10767@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>
In article <·····@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> ········@crd.ge.com writes:
[...]
>LISP isn't dead.  It's just recuperating from all the hype of the
>early '80s. 

My sentiments exactly. My opinion (wishful thinking?) is that it is
already on the mend.
				- Marty
From: Daniel A Haug
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <463@shrike.AUSTIN.LOCKHEED.COM>
From article <·····@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>, by ········@crd.ge.com (Kenneth J Meltsner):

> [...]
>
> LISP isn't dead.  It's just recuperating from all the hype of the
> early '80s. 

I agree!  Lisp is certainly not dead in the areas in which I work.  In fact,
I see a steady stream of business in Lisp-based applications.  Migration
from lisp-machines to Unix boxes, which IMHO really took off only in the
last couple of years, can help ensure that it doesn't die.  Our past problems
were related to delivery.  End users wanted to run *programs*, or link
in *libraries*, not boot into *worlds* on esoteric computer systems.  Once
we started delivering applications in similar fashion to C developers,
the end users could care less about the implementation language.

dan haug-- 
Internet: ····@austin.lockheed.com
UUCP:     ut-emx!lad-shrike!aihaug
Phone:    (512) 386-4634
From: Jeff Prothero
Subject: Lisp vs Functional programming
Date: 
Message-ID: <JSP.91Jan14114016@glia.biostr.washington.edu.>
In article <······················@arris.com> ········@arris.com (Richard Shapiro) writes:

>[Lisp is] the best general purpose programming language for symbolic
>computing, and symbolic computing has turned out to be very useful in
>AI applications. There are special purpose languages that are better
>at symbol manipulation, but of the widely available general languages,
>no other one really comes close.

Speaking as one of those brain-dead C hackers who's beginning to take
an interest in Lisp (and a little discouraged to hear it's dead :-),
I'd be curious to hear what you hardcore Lisp types think about the
latest wave of functional languages generally, and Haskell in
particular.

* Bad idea?

* Potential replacement for lisp?

* Interesting idea, but completely different ecological niche?

(My apologies if this issue has been beaten to death already!)

--
Jeff Prothero (···@u.washington.edu)  <std disclaimer>
Biological Structure Graphics Lab, University of Washington
From: Jeff Dalton
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <3946@skye.ed.ac.uk>
In article <······················@arris.com> ········@arris.com (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>AI programmers use Lisp for much simpler reasons:

I don't think Lisp will do all that well if only AI programmers use
Lisp.  For one thing, it's not clear that AI programmers will continue
to use Lisp.  There's already a tendency to move to C, especially for
applications that are fairly well understood.  (If you know how to
write it before you start, you can write it in C.)  There's also a
tendency to use tools, such as expert system shells, and for those
to be implemented in C rather than Lisp.  And, of course, if AI
doesn't do all that well itself, anything tied to it will suffer
too.

Fortunately, it isn't just AI programmers who use Lisp.  For example,
Lisp is doing fairly well as a language for teaching and as an embedded
extension language for editors, CAD systems, etc.  However, it is
unlikely that this is enough to sustain the Lisp industry at its
current level.

>5) For various reasons, Lisp systems tend to have quite sophisticated
>programming environments, and these are essential in the generation of
>complex programs (eg AI programs). Symbolics LISPMs are a particularly
>good example of this. The increase in productivity is impossible to
>overstate.

But other languages are catching up, and Lisp environments on
"conventional" machines tned not to match the symbolics.

-- jeff
From: Brad Miller
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1991Jan15.230926.25923@cs.rochester.edu>
In article <····@skye.ed.ac.uk> ····@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
|I don't think Lisp will do all that well if only AI programmers use
|Lisp.  For one thing, it's not clear that AI programmers will continue
|to use Lisp.  There's already a tendency to move to C, especially for
|applications that are fairly well understood.  (If you know how to
|write it before you start, you can write it in C.)  

If you know how to write it, it isn't AI.

-- 
----
Brad MillerU. Rochester Comp Sci Dept.
······@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}
From: Jeff Dalton
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <3952@skye.ed.ac.uk>
In article <······················@cs.rochester.edu> ······@cs.rochester.edu (Brad Miller) writes:
>In article <····@skye.ed.ac.uk> ····@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>|I don't think Lisp will do all that well if only AI programmers use
>|Lisp.  For one thing, it's not clear that AI programmers will continue
>|to use Lisp.  There's already a tendency to move to C, especially for
>|applications that are fairly well understood.  (If you know how to
>|write it before you start, you can write it in C.)  
>
>If you know how to write it, it isn't AI.

Well, then, much of commercial AI isn't AI.
From: ·······@ai-cyclops.jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <11053@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
In article <····@idunno.Princeton.EDU> ·····@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
Handelman) writes:
>;>Common LISP effectively died from obesity.
>;
>;*And* still managed to leave out "neq".
>
>It died because it was linked to AI and that died. 
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

My sponsors will be very surprised when they find out.

*
Len Charest
Jet Propulsion Lab/Artificial Intelligence Lab
*
From: Ozan Yigit
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Date: 
Message-ID: <21550@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
In article <····@paradigm.com> ···@paradigm.com writes:

>What is happening at Texas Instruments?

Scheme ? ;-)