In article <··············@cat.bbsr.edu> <·······@cat.bbsr.edu> (Bill Hunter) writes:
--> (Open invitation to be flamed, but it's an honest question ...)
--> Maybe we
--> can do something about it given that corporate America is finally
--> waking up to the fact that the COBOL era has ended and the successor
--> language is not yet identified.
sure it is. it's called C. it's just like "buying IBM": no one ever lost
their job for writing something in C.
I've gotten cynical about it. my time doing Lisp work is drawing to a
close...sigh. at least my LispMs still work. I finally did some mods to
my news-reader last week to incorporate "kill-file" behavior. now if I
could just get the articles sorted properly...
-- clint
and I'm going to be writing C code now. yuk!
From: Bill Hunter
Subject: Re: Why is Lisp inactive compared to Perl et al?
Date:
Message-ID: <5117cb$122c1.33f@cat.bbsr.edu>
Clint Hyde <·····@bbn.com> wrote:
>sure it is. it's called C. it's just like "buying IBM": no one ever lost
>their job for writing something in C.
I don't quite agree - the limitations of C seem to have pushed people
into flirting with C++ at most places. Without devolving into a
general discussion of C++ , my take is that the language is Just Not
Simple Enough, and that after a few major corporate software
development projects go off the rails, managers will be looking for
alternatives. There are several candidates. The strongest one is
probably Smalltalk. If Smalltalk is a contender, why not Lisp?
Actually (shudder) the strongest candidate at the moment is probably
Visual Basic...
From: Patrick Logan
Subject: Re: Why is Lisp inactive compared to Perl et al?
Date:
Message-ID: <3peia5$mpk@ornews.intel.com>
(Bill Hunter) (·······@cat.bbsr.edu) wrote:
: ...managers will be looking for
: alternatives. There are several candidates. The strongest one is
: probably Smalltalk. If Smalltalk is a contender, why not Lisp?
Because Smalltalk vendors have been promoting Smalltalk as a
productive tool in the MIS/Client-Server world. And they have been
relatively successful: Smalltalk is growing in that world more
rapidly than C++.
The Lisp world has many more stereotypes to overcome and noone
leading the charge. The battle is all but over. Franz is making
some amount of effort, by emphasizing objects rather than Lisp
in its Windows product.
I have been using Smalltalk for over a year now, after using CommonLisp
and Scheme as my languages of choice for ten years.
(Of choice: I don't always get to
choose and so use C++ most of all.)
It is really a subset of Lisp with a different syntax, but it is
not-too-surprisingly effective. Especially compared to C++.
The vendors has added a great deal of functionality to the language,
which makes it all the more effective.