Quoth ····@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton):
> I hope we can avoid a language war here...
I thought that's what c.l.l is for :-).
I wish there were good demographics data. Maybe that would focus our
"Lisp is dead" threads and maybe even defragment the landscape.
For example:
o Are there very many people who learned CL or CLOS recently
not for legacy code or programming language research but to
write new applications? Or is it mostly historical users?
o How many non-academics use Lisp heavily?
o Will a new standard increase Lisp market share or fragment
existing market share?
o How many Schemers think source code incompatibility is a
problem?
o How many elispers would be convinced to use Guile?
o How many people use xlisp and what are the most important
features to them?
o How many people would use Scheme for Java's VM?
o How many people would use a standard (i.e. all code runs
portably on more than one implementation) dialect of Lisp
for everyday scripting purposes? (Fast regexps, easy pipes,
OS interface.)
o How many people think standards are important? lreP does
not have one, but who worries about it dying? On the other
hand Gina is dead and who knows which Scheme will become the
most popular.
o What percentage of Lisp users would "defect" to non-Lisp
syntax (Dylan, Java) if they had their favorite semantics
and library functions?
I'm not asking for opinions on these questions, just saying that maybe
we could focus our "squabbles" better if we knew the answers somehow.
I sometimes run du on /var/spool/news/comp/lang and related groups to
count the number of articles posted about each language. I sometimes
even analyze the newsgroups for things like relative percentages of
.edu sites. But that doesn't answer all of the questions. Market
data from commercial concerns might be interesting if they were
interested in telling us.
If you post a followup to this article, I would appreciate a courtesy
verbatim copy by email to help work around potentially unreliable feeds.
---
···@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov. AI, multidisciplinary neuroethology, info filtering.
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