In article <·············@acm.org>, ······@acm.org wrote:
> If Lisp is more productive, as the studies proved, why, then, did it
> fail in the marketplace?
Where did it fail?
Last time I looked I saw atleast five Common Lisp vendors.
Last time I looked I saw people very actively doing cool
things in Scheme (Guile, ELK, SGML/DSSL, SIOD, scsh, RScheme, Scheme 48,
XLisp 3.0, Meroon, ..........).
Last time I looked I saw very prestigous projects being done
in Lisp. Like logistics in the Gulf War, scheduling tasks for the
Hubble Telescope, diverse NASA applications, graphics
for leading game consoles, distributing electronic documents at
the White House web site, large scale electronic publishing
at Airbus, etc.
Even Microsoft did mockup versions of Word in Macintosh Common Lisp.
> You can be one of those elite super software engineer. You would love
> Lisp or Scheme. Getting a large group of people (4 people or more) is a
> different story.
Well, we are a small company. Three people are doing programming
task. All of them prefer Lisp. All of them use Lisp.
>
> Of course, if you have 4 bright engineers who all love Lisp, you are a
> lucky manager. I envy you.
Our management does support the users of Lisp. This is based on
the fact that they were able to produce useful inhouse software
(for complex and for trivial tasks). Some of this stuff
we may eventually sell to some customers. We are for example
convinced that CL-HTTP is a very significant technology
advantage for Common Lisp.
You can complain all day. You will only make a difference if
you can actually make a useful contribution.
I'm tired about this syntax discussions, who cares?
--
http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/
······@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
>Last time I looked I saw very prestigous projects being done
>in Lisp. Like logistics in the Gulf War, [...]
Oh boy. I'm so proud... :-(
(But I do agree with the rest of the article.)
In article <··········@agate.berkeley.edu>, ··@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU
(Brian Harvey) wrote:
> ······@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
> >Last time I looked I saw very prestigous projects being done
> >in Lisp. Like logistics in the Gulf War, [...]
>
> Oh boy. I'm so proud... :-(
Whether we like it or not, it was a very advanced application
of Lisp-based technology. Don't underestimate the influence
such a "success" story has on funding, opinion, etc.
Unless you can demonstrate successful real world usage, industry
and government will not spend any money.
--
http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/
Brian and Rainer prove the point of my original message with
their remarks. I pointed out some sucessful commercial products
which use Lisp technology, Macsyma, and Gensym's G2 family,
and asserted that they couldn't have been as succesful if they
stuck with the offerings of commercial lisp vendors. Both
these companies support their own lisp implementations, just
like AI or Expert System groups did in the "old days" of the 1970's.
Macsyma in particular suffered in comparison with Mathematica
in being very late to be ported in a commercially viable way to
popular platforms.
Then Rainer comments about another "Government Sponsored Application"
which, because of the "cost-plus" accounting methodology of most current
military funding can easily afford any lisp platform as a pass along
cost.
My point was that "choice of lisp" has a lot to do with famous failure
cases. Software Vendors who stuck it out and used the commercial lisp
offerings were punished.
Rainer Joswig <······@lavielle.com> wrote in article
<·································@news.lavielle.com>...
> In article <··········@agate.berkeley.edu>, ··@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU
> (Brian Harvey) wrote:
>
> > ······@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
> > >Last time I looked I saw very prestigous projects being done
> > >in Lisp. Like logistics in the Gulf War, [...]
> >
> > Oh boy. I'm so proud... :-(
>
> Whether we like it or not, it was a very advanced application
> of Lisp-based technology. Don't underestimate the influence
> such a "success" story has on funding, opinion, etc.
In article <·································@news.lavielle.com>,
······@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) wrote:
> Even Microsoft did mockup versions of Word in Macintosh Common Lisp.
Is this true?? Do you have any references to papers or interviews where
this is discussed??
It's hard to imagine a Lisp version of 'Word' running slower or taking more
memory than the 'real thing'.....
Perhaps they should have kept the mockup, and thrown away the rest...
In article <·······················@10.0.2.1>, ······@netcom.com (Henry
Baker) wrote:
> In article <·································@news.lavielle.com>,
> ······@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) wrote:
>
> > Even Microsoft did mockup versions of Word in Macintosh Common Lisp.
>
> Is this true?? Do you have any references to papers or interviews where
> this is discussed??
Steve Strassman (at that time for Apple) once was looking
at a Microsoft Word interface study with Resedit
(with this tool you can look inside structured data
in applications).
It was about OLE support or something like that and
on a Microsoft CD-ROM. He discovered that it was written
in MCL and had the menus and and icon bars of MS Word
(if I remember the posting from Steve Strassman correctly).
Well seems logical to me. MCL is a cool tool for testing
user interfaces. It is sure easier to prototype and
demonstrate new user interfaces in MCL, than anything else
you could use on a Mac.
> It's hard to imagine a Lisp version of 'Word' running slower or taking more
> memory than the 'real thing'.....
>
> Perhaps they should have kept the mockup, and thrown away the rest...
Yes, and they would have gotten a real extension language
for free.
--
http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/
From: Sin-Yaw Wang
Subject: Re: Why lisp succeeds in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <330DEEDE.CA8@acm.org>
Rainer Joswig wrote:
> In article <·············@acm.org>, ······@acm.org wrote:
> > If Lisp is more productive, as the studies proved, why, then, did it
> > fail in the marketplace?
> Where did it fail?
Oh, come on. Get out of your denial box.
--
Sin-Yaw Wang, ······@acm.org
http://www.concentric.net/~sinyaw/
From: David H. Thornley
Subject: Re: Why lisp succeeds in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <5enstg$rt7@epx.cis.umn.edu>
In article <············@acm.org>, Sin-Yaw Wang <······@acm.org> wrote:
>Rainer Joswig wrote:
>> In article <·············@acm.org>, ······@acm.org wrote:
>> > If Lisp is more productive, as the studies proved, why, then, did it
>> > fail in the marketplace?
>> Where did it fail?
>
>Oh, come on. Get out of your denial box.
>
To repeat: why do you say Lisp failed in the marketplace? There are several
companies out there developing and selling implementations of Common Lisp,
and they do have customers. If Lisp were a failure, why would we be seeing
several companies in competition with each other?
Moreover, is Lisp any less popular than it has been? My guess would be that
it's increasing in popularity, albeit slowly. (This is probably because it
is now possible to get a good implementation for a few hundred dollars that
will run on a standard desktop box, either Macintosh or Windows.) It's
always had its users.
To address a deeper question, efficiency does not win fast, if at all, in
the marketplace. Most programming shops are run very inefficiently, and could
be run much better using knowledge that's been out there in easy-to-read
books for decades. If the manager is not interested in enforcing code
reviews and change controls, what's the chance that the manager is interested
in changing to a more efficient language? Over the next several decades, I
expect competition to slowly raise the efficiency, but it's still going to
take some serious changes to replace C/C++ as the language of choice.
David H. Thornley, known to the Wise as ········@cs.umn.edu O-
Disclaimer: These are not the opinions of the University of Minnesota,
its Regents, faculty, staff, students, or squirrels.
Datclaimer: Well, maybe the squirrels. They're pretty smart.
--
David H. Thornley, known to the Wise as ········@cs.umn.edu O-
Disclaimer: These are not the opinions of the University of Minnesota,
its Regents, faculty, staff, students, or squirrels.
Datclaimer: Well, maybe the squirrels. They're pretty smart.
From: ·······@cs.jyu.fi
Subject: Re: Why lisp succeeds in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <5f1a37$ceh@mordred.cc.jyu.fi>
In <··········@epx.cis.umn.edu>, ········@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) writes:
>In article <············@acm.org>, Sin-Yaw Wang <······@acm.org> wrote:
>>Rainer Joswig wrote:
>>> In article <·············@acm.org>, ······@acm.org wrote:
>>> > If Lisp is more productive, as the studies proved, why, then, did it
>>> > fail in the marketplace?
>>> Where did it fail?
>>
>>Oh, come on. Get out of your denial box.
>>
>To repeat: why do you say Lisp failed in the marketplace? There are several
>companies out there developing and selling implementations of Common Lisp,
>and they do have customers. If Lisp were a failure, why would we be seeing
>several companies in competition with each other?
(munch)
I love Lisp and I would like to have been able to use it all the time. But...
I have been developing fairly complicated software for OS/2 and Unix and
Windows NT. I would like to write it in Lisp, but I really do not see Lisp
as a viable cross-platform tool. *If* there were a Common Lisp with
GUI tools for *all* those platforms and a price-tag I could justify,
I would part some money at once.
The problem with Lucid CL (I used it in late 80's) was that the machines
and the language were fairly expensive. Nowadays the same performance
can be got with PCs, but I have not yet seen cross-platform Lisp which could
really compete with IBM's VisualAge for Smalltalk (standard).
I would, however, love to use Lisp instead of Smalltalk...