From: ········@bayou.uh.edu
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <5etdav$u31@Masala.CC.UH.EDU>
Erik Naggum (····@naggum.no) wrote:
: * 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.
My sentiments exactly. When I write in Lisp or even peruse the
manuals, I never leave with the feeling that I wanted something.
This is in stark contrast to C/C++. The good people who wrote
Lisp made it a point to make it _useful_ so we wouldn't have
to run around like chickens with our heads cut off trying
to implement some basic functionality just so we could start
coding.
: far less "grunt work" is necessary in Lisp
: than in C/C++/whatever, where it seems there's very little _beyond_ "grunt
: work".
Exactly. The situation is particularly acute for C/C++ however. Too
much time is lost trying to figure out how to go around the various
language deficiencies, and too little time is spent coding. I've
had days where I decided to go back to C just to see how it would
feel after I'd been spoiled by Haskell and Lisp, and I'm not
exxagerating when I say that after 5-10 minutes of coding it would
become painfully apparent just how much time I'd waste in coding
_Around_ the language so that I could _Begin_ solving the problem.
I'd then delete my source file in disgust, and go back to Lisp.
I've had projects in Lisp that took half the time that coding
the _Framework_ in C would have taken! Not the project, just
the red tape and other B.S. that I'd have to write in C to
get _Started_ on the project!
Suffice to say, I don't miss C one bit, but I maintain that code
so I still see that garbage.
: 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...
Yeah I had that happen to me today as a matter of fact. I was doing
some coding for a simple subset of Forth, and there was zero grunt
work involved (or very close to zero). Reading symbols directly
to calling the functions involved after testing for membership, it
started to feel like very high level pseudocode, even a vague
description of the program at one point!
My esteem for Lisp is even greater than ever.
C/C++ programmers -- you can play with your NULL pointers until
you're blue in the face. I'm keeping my Lisp!
: #\Erik
: --
: if you think big enough, you never have to do it
--
Cya,
Ahmed
I found Dick Gabriel's article on the net (How to Win(95) Big), but it is
in html format. Is there a .dvi, .ps, .doc, .rtf, or .pdf version on the
web somewhere?
Thanks in advance.
From: William Clodius
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
Date:
Message-ID: <33130CBF.2781@lanl.gov>
Henry Baker wrote:
>
> I found Dick Gabriel's article on the net (How to Win(95) Big), but it is
> in html format. Is there a .dvi, .ps, .doc, .rtf, or .pdf version on the
> web somewhere?
>
> Thanks in advance.
Try the Programming language Critiques Page
http://galen.med.virginia.edu/~sdm7g/LangCrit/index.html
and it's subpage
http://galen.med.virginia.edu/~sdm7g/LangCrit/gabriel/
--
William B. Clodius Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2 FAX: (505)-667-3815
PO Box 1663, MS-C323 Group office: (505)-667-5776
Los Alamos, NM 87545 Email: ········@lanl.gov