From: Sin-Yaw Wang
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <331212EE.6759@acm.org>
Chris Bitmead wrote:
> >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.
> But you don't *need* 4 people, if you have one "elite super lisp
> programmer".
>
> That's part of the real problem actually. Managers think in terms of
> needing a body count of say 20 people. They never stop to consider
> that 4 very talented people might do the job of 20, quicker, cheaper
I wish that all my projects can be done with 4 or fewer people. But,
Chris, they just ain't so. I now limit my team size to 4, believing
that is the largest without losing productivity.
Super engineers want other people to do "grunt works" so that they can
have some good time. Those "grunt works" people do not know Lisp well.
--
Sin-Yaw Wang, ······@acm.org
http://www.concentric.net/~sinyaw/
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <3065819862546814@naggum.no>
* Sin-Yaw Wang
| Super engineers want other people to do "grunt works" so that they can
| have some good time. Those "grunt works" people do not know Lisp well.
I find that the programmers of the Lisp system I'm using have done a _lot_
of the "grunt work" for me. far less "grunt work" is necessary in Lisp
than in C/C++/whatever, where it seems there's very little _beyond_ "grunt
work". in fact, there's so _little_ "grunt work" in one of my current
projects that I actually miss it a little -- I found it relaxing to spend
some time with some moderately unintelligent task like putting Emacs or the
shell to work on cross-referencing my files or tweaking some implementation
detail, but these are already taken care of (most of them, anyway). which,
of course, means that most of the "grunt workers" would be out of work if
they used a better language. maybe _that's_ why they don't know Lisp...
#\Erik
--
if you think big enough, you never have to do it