From: J W Dalton
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Date:
Message-ID: <CxBDyG.MCn@festival.ed.ac.uk>
···@specialform.com (Keith M. Corbett) writes:
>In article <··········@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>, ····@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) says:
>>
>>In article <············@sytex.com> ····@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin) writes:
>>>·······@cabell.vcu.edu (Adrian L. Flanagan) writes:
>>>
>>> 3. "Ivory Tower Syndrom" -- YES! Now I think we're getting to
>>>the heart of the matter ;-)
>>
>>How so?
>>
>>I could understand someone saying Lisp vendors went after market A
>>(AI researchers, perhaps?) when they should have gone after market B
>>(commercial DOS users?). But the two of you seem to be saying they
>>misunderstood the market they went after. Perhaps you think they
>>went for B and blew it when what they really did was go for A.
>Or perhaps they went after market C - people building large scale
>applications; only to discover that most such people were not much
>interested in A) learning symbolic programming techniques and B) spending
>$$$$$$ on hardware that weren't suited to running or developing other
>kinds of applications.
>I'm not merely speculating here; I was manager of software support at LMI,
>one of the Lisp vendors that died in the 80s. The label "Ivory Tower
>Syndrome" might describe some of the researchers at LMI, but management
>was keenly aware of market forces. We were not trying to compete with
>PCs, and we didn't expect to survive by catering to AI researchers.
>Like many other vendors of specialized HW and SW we were gambling on the
>chance that what we were building would catch on in the larger market.
In some other newsgroups, there's a sort of Lisp and Tcl flame
fest going on. RMS posted something about why you should not
use Tcl and said something about a Lisp-like syntax as one of
the syntaxes for a GNU scripting language. I don't want to see
that discussion here as well. I'm just giving some background.
My real point is this:
Several people, including the inventor of Tcl, are making a
market argument: Lisp tried and failed to be a "mainstream"
language.
It is my view that there was no attempt to make Lisp a mainstream
language, but other people will know more about particular commerical
(and non-commercial) ventures than I do.
Consider the commercial Lisps of the 80s. Some required expensive,
specialized hardware (Lisp machines); others required hardware that
was just expensive (top-end workstations w/ lots of memory). The
Lisps themselves were also fairly expensive. None were suitable
for writing small, standalone programs. If that was trying to
make Lisp "mainstream", it was a strange way to go about it!
-- jeff