From: Bill Vrotney
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1993Jan14.093640.20306@ads.com>
In article <·····················@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
········@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (M. Bersohn) writes:

>   Hello all you LISP experts.
>           I learned LISP about 25 years ago and used it intensely
>   for about 2 years. I had to convert the project to another
>   language because LISP of 1970 was simply too slow. It was
>   very expensive to run so slowly on a main frame.
>           Decades passed. Now we have cheap workstations. I've
>   also been hearing that LISP is now acceptably fast. SO,
>   like Rip Van Winkle I come back to LISP, only to find that
>   LISP is still not a mainstream language. This has certain
>   bad consequences.
>   1. The compilers, having fewer users per product, are more
>   likely to have bugs in them then compilers of Fortran,
>   Cobol or (is this a dirty word?) C++.
>   2. It's harder to find LISP programmers available for six
>   months or two years. In a mainstream language this is no
>   problem.
>            My question is, why after these decades, is Lisp, with
>   all its power and elegance, basically still confined to AI people in
>   Universities? What's wrong?

I used to think the answer to you question was complex, but now I think that
it is simple. I call it "C sickness". For Lisp to become mainstream it has
to be small, fast and hardened. C is mainstream.  All of the technological
ingredients for Lisp to be as small, fast and hard as C are here. All that
is required at this point is desire. However, that desire is deferred by
complacency with C. C is not as good as Lisp but it is good enough. The
world has to keep rolling along. Only if people have the desire to use Lisp
as a mainstream language will it happen. Programmers will be zombies until
it does.
--
Bill Vrotney
BAH/Advanced Decision Systems
From: Christopher Ian Connolly
Subject: Re: Why Isn't Lisp a Mainstream Language?
Date: 
Message-ID: <58771@dime.cs.umass.edu>
In article <······················@ads.com> ········@ADS.COM (Bill Vrotney) writes:
>it is simple. I call it "C sickness". For Lisp to become mainstream it has
>to be small, fast and hardened. C is mainstream.  All of the technological
>ingredients for Lisp to be as small, fast and hard as C are here. 

It also helps that for the longest time, C was "free" with every Un*x
system.  I think that factor added immensely to both the C programmer
pool and to the C complacency you mentioned.

Christopher Ian Connolly			········@cs.umass.edu
Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics		wa2ifi
University of Massachusetts at Amherst		Amherst, MA 01003