From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3putxf4lr.fsf@cley.com>
I asked this question the other day, but it was in the context of
another thread and may have been lost.
I'm interested how many people teaching Lisp (specifically CL, but I
guess other non-Scheme Lisps too) in academia read c.l.l regularly.
If you fit this category, could you mail me (I'm not trying to acquire
a mailing list or anything here, I just want to count numbers).
Thanks
--tim
From: Steve Long
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <38AA816A.C0347684@isomedia.com>
I learned or relearned a great deal from this newsgroup. It is
easy to write inefficient code in Lisp (and I still sometimes do, when
pressed for time) because the compilers (like ACL) are so forgiving.
I've written
some pretty awful code and asked for assistance from c.l.l.,
getting everything from a diatribe on a preference for
limiting conses to a scathing attack on my placement of parentheses to
very useful
suggestions for modifying an algorithm. As a result, I'm writing better
code.
I would like to know what folks are using Lisp for, and why they have
chosen the
language over C, C++, or Java. Also, it looks as though many
of the participants in this newsgroup are from Europe. Is this
simply coincidence or is there a regional preference for using a high
level language?
I'm in the Seattle metro area, with
one of the highest concentration of software engineers in
the world, and there are only a handful of people using Lisp
to do non-academic work.
Steve Long
> Steve Long wrote:
> ...
> I would like to know what folks are using Lisp for, and why they have
> chosen the
> language over C, C++, or Java. Also, it looks as though many
> of the participants in this newsgroup are from Europe. Is this
> simply coincidence or is there a regional preference for using a high
> level language?
Don't Americans think of (us) Europeans as long-haired academic freaks?
> I'm in the Seattle metro area, with
> one of the highest concentration of software engineers in
> the world, and there are only a handful of people using Lisp
> to do non-academic work.
>
Don't we in turn think of Americans in terms of hardboiled businessmen?
Illustrating this with Microsoft Windows vs Linux perhaps.
< many grins>
Lars Lundback
From: Steve Long
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <38AC0686.24543970@isomedia.com>
Lars Lundback wrote:
> Don't Americans think of (us) Europeans as long-haired academic freaks?
>
If you've still got your hair, I say wear it any way you please :)
From: Sam Steingold
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <ubt5fj0dp.fsf@ksp.com>
>>>> In message <·················@isomedia.com>
>>>> On the subject of "Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l"
>>>> Sent on Wed, 16 Feb 2000 10:52:32 +0000
>>>> Honorable Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com> writes:
>>
>> I would like to know what folks are using Lisp for,
everything - text processing scripts, data analysis, trading systems &c
>> and why they have chosen the language over C, C++, or Java.
<URL:http://www.podval.org/~sds/tool.html>
--
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds)
Micros**t is not the answer. Micros**t is a question, and the answer is Linux,
(http://www.linux.org) the choice of the GNU (http://www.gnu.org) generation.
Don't hit a man when he's down -- kick him; it's easier.
Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com> wrote in message
······················@isomedia.com...
> I would like to know what folks are using Lisp for, and why they have
> chosen the
> language over C, C++, or Java. Also, it looks as though many
> of the participants in this newsgroup are from Europe. Is this
> simply coincidence or is there a regional preference for using a high
> level language?
> I'm in the Seattle metro area, with
> one of the highest concentration of software engineers in
> the world, and there are only a handful of people using Lisp
> to do non-academic work.
>
> Steve Long
>
>
I live and work in Vancouver, Canada, and am one of 6 or 7 developers
writing code in LISP (CLOS). The choice was made several years before I
started here (www.mercury.bc.ca) so abviously not by me. I was very
surprised to find anyone using lisp commercially in Vancouver.
I also use lisp for a couple of personal knowledge-base projects and for
various quick 'n dirty jobs like creating web pages from text-based data
files and making custom "themes" to use with MS Frontpage98. I chose it
personally because of the interactive development environment and because it
feels so goood! ;-) (and a few reasons that i can't say are based on my own
experiences but rather on the opinions and assertions of others-thouroughly
salted, of course)
My future multi-billion $ high-tech company will be founded entirely on lisp
code : )
Coby
In article <···············@cley.com>, Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com>
wrote:
>I asked this question the other day, but it was in the context of
>another thread and may have been lost.
>
>I'm interested how many people teaching Lisp (specifically CL, but I
>guess other non-Scheme Lisps too) in academia read c.l.l regularly.
>
>If you fit this category, could you mail me (I'm not trying to acquire
>a mailing list or anything here, I just want to count numbers).
me, real CL, year after year ... I used to do a 2-quarter sequence
in AI programming, but now I do 1, Ken Forbus does 1, and
I do a Java components course in the winter
class page:
http://www.cs.nwu.edu/academics/courses/c25/
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3snysuifn.fsf@cley.com>
* I wrote:
> I'm interested how many people teaching Lisp (specifically CL, but I
> guess other non-Scheme Lisps too) in academia read c.l.l regularly.
Thanks to the people who responded (so far).
What I'm really trying to find out is how lisp teaching works, in
particular, how do people who are teaching lisp keep reasonably
current? My suspicion (based on some personal experience, but nothing
statistically valid of course) is that a lot of lisp teaching is
*enormously* out of date, and people are basically being taught ways
of programming in Lisp which will cause them to reject it out of hand
in favour of Java / C++ / whatever.
I was (naively) thinking that `being current' in Lisp might correlate
quite well with reading c.l.l, as this seems to be the most active
Lisp community and have a high-enough proportion of experts that you
do get reasonable answers and do get an impression of where people are
going.
But I think this may just be wrong, since there are people I know of
who definitely are not out of date, do teach, and didn't respond (of
course this may be just because they don't see why they should).
So now I'm wondering how the coherence of communities like `Lisp
people' is maintained (if I can call lisp people a community), or
indeed *if* it is maintained. How does it work for C, or Perl? Is it
working for Lisp? Does it even matter if it's not? Are there other
mechanisms for keeping current?
My intuition is that it *does* matter, somehow, and that there is
currently a real problem, specifically in Lisp teaching, where people
are just hugely out of date (I mean 20 or 30 years, not 5 or 10), but
I have no real evidence for this.
I'd be interested in knowing what people think about this...
--tim
* Tim Bradshaw
|
| My suspicion (based on some personal experience, but nothing
| statistically valid of course) is that a lot of lisp teaching is
| *enormously* out of date,
One data point: this is certainly the case at the University of Oslo,
where I remember being told that Lisp was dynamically scoped and other
nonsense like that[1]. We were given an obligatory exercise which
could be solved in either Standard ML or Scheme, but it was almost
designed to be written in SML and we had seen very little of Scheme,
so no sensible student would choose to do it in Scheme.
Of course, I did it in Scheme, and that was the beginning of my
interest in Lisp.
| and people are basically being taught ways of programming in Lisp
| which will cause them to reject it out of hand in favour of Java /
| C++ / whatever.
That was my experience, at least.
| So now I'm wondering how the coherence of communities like `Lisp
| people' is maintained (if I can call lisp people a community), or
| indeed *if* it is maintained.
Good question.
| How does it work for C, or Perl?
For Python the community is built around http://www.python.org/,
comp.lang.python, the SIGs (see the web site) and also the Python
Software Activity (PSA) where people can get involved with running the
aforementioned.
A lot of this is centered around the freely available implementations
that anyone can modify and tinker with and through discussion in the
right fora it is possible to also change the language.
| Is it working for Lisp?
I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is no
active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some sort of
community, but not Common Lisp.
| My intuition is that it *does* matter, somehow, and that there is
| currently a real problem, specifically in Lisp teaching, where
| people are just hugely out of date (I mean 20 or 30 years, not 5 or
| 10), but I have no real evidence for this.
I also think it does, and I think the teaching bit is just a symptom
of a deeper problem: the lack of a real community. But this is all the
opinion of someone who is quite new to Lisp and hasn't really dived
into it.
--Lars M.
[1] By the professors, that is. One of the assistant teachers knew
very well what he was talking about. (Hi, Oluf. :-)
Lars Marius Garshol <······@garshol.priv.no> writes:
> I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is no
> active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some sort of
> community, but not Common Lisp.
I'm not quite sure how broad the scope of that statement was meant
to be...?
--
(espen)
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is
| no active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some
| sort of community, but not Common Lisp.
* Espen Vestre
|
| I'm not quite sure how broad the scope of that statement was meant
| to be...?
I don't really understand the question, but what I meant was that
although there are still people working with Lisp, new people learning
it and even active development of implementations there seems to be no
larger community that these people are a part of and no real further
development of the language itself and the environment around it.
--Lars M.
From: Raymond Wiker
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <873dqr26ej.fsf@foobar.orion.no>
Lars Marius Garshol <······@garshol.priv.no> writes:
> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is
> | no active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some
> | sort of community, but not Common Lisp.
>
> * Espen Vestre
> |
> | I'm not quite sure how broad the scope of that statement was meant
> | to be...?
>
> I don't really understand the question, but what I meant was that
> although there are still people working with Lisp, new people learning
> it and even active development of implementations there seems to be no
> larger community that these people are a part of and no real further
> development of the language itself and the environment around it.
Well, there is comp.lang.lisp, as well as product-specific
mailing lists for a number of implementations. There are some people
working on reaffirming/extending(?) the ANSI standard, and a LISP
mapping for CORBA has recently been approved.
Compare this with C++ and Java, where you have a lot of
activity which, in some ways, seems like it's going to eventually
produce a subset of LISP, but without all the little details that
*really* sets LISP apart.[1]
All things considered, the outlook for LISP people is not too
bleak :-)
Footnotes:
[1] STL containers, strings, exceptions and run-time type information
for C++. Anonymous functions for Java, in a truly blecherous syntax.
--
Raymond Wiker, Orion Systems AS
+47 370 61150
* Raymond Wiker
|
| There are some people working on reaffirming/extending(?) the ANSI
| standard,
Are there? Could anyone say more about this work?
| and a LISP mapping for CORBA has recently been approved.
I noticed this, but AFAIK this was mainly done by Franz.
--Lars M.
From: Raymond Wiker
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <87zoszztt3.fsf@foobar.orion.no>
Lars Marius Garshol <······@garshol.priv.no> writes:
> * Raymond Wiker
> |
> | There are some people working on reaffirming/extending(?) the ANSI
> | standard,
>
> Are there? Could anyone say more about this work?
>
> | and a LISP mapping for CORBA has recently been approved.
>
> I noticed this, but AFAIK this was mainly done by Franz.
That may be so, but there were a number of other parties
involved. Whatever, the result is that there now is a standard CORBA
binding for LISP. Good for LISP, and probably also good for CORBA.
--
Raymond Wiker, Orion Systems AS
+47 370 61150
From: Raymond Wiker
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <87wvo3ztiv.fsf@foobar.orion.no>
Raymond Wiker <·······@orion.no> writes:
> Lars Marius Garshol <······@garshol.priv.no> writes:
>
> > * Raymond Wiker
> > |
> > | There are some people working on reaffirming/extending(?) the ANSI
> > | standard,
> >
> > Are there? Could anyone say more about this work?
> >
> > | and a LISP mapping for CORBA has recently been approved.
> >
> > I noticed this, but AFAIK this was mainly done by Franz.
>
> That may be so, but there were a number of other parties
> involved. Whatever, the result is that there now is a standard CORBA
> binding for LISP. Good for LISP, and probably also good for CORBA.
I say "probably" because people who use CORBA from lesser
languages may feel a little let down when they see how much of the
pain of using CORBA is caused by the target language :-)
--
Raymond Wiker, Orion Systems AS
+47 370 61150
Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw a time when Lars Marius Garshol
would say:
>* Raymond Wiker
>| and a LISP mapping for CORBA has recently been approved.
>
>I noticed this, but AFAIK this was mainly done by Franz.
Whether for good or for ill, that's the way the OMG works. It accepts
proposals from members, which are generally companies.
--
Your latest program has been judged UNTASTEFUL by the T daemon;
and automatically deleted.
········@hex.net- <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/corba.html>
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3og9fvk73.fsf@cley.com>
* Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is no
> active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some sort of
> community, but not Common Lisp.
I think that's unduly depressing. There is at least *one* active Lisp
community and this is it.
(And I think it's growing in fact, at least volume of news in c.l.l
seems to be increasing)
--tim
On the one hand, the number of peopole who get connected, is increasing.
On the other hand you may argue that LISP users were typically the harbinger
of the internet generation (I hope I use the word harbinger correctly).
I would believe that.
So it is not quite clear what the numbers mean.
I am sure that much more peaple use Lisp today that ten years ago (though of
course I could not prove that statement, I just feel it). (Many things seem
to indicate this.) On the other hand the number of Lisp programmers
compared to all programmers may have become less. I think it is very
difficult to make a decent statement about such numbers.
Janos Blazi
Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
···············@cley.com...
> * Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
>
> > I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is no
> > active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some sort of
> > community, but not Common Lisp.
>
> I think that's unduly depressing. There is at least *one* active Lisp
> community and this is it.
>
> (And I think it's growing in fact, at least volume of news in c.l.l
> seems to be increasing)
>
> --tim
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3itznv8ek.fsf@cley.com>
* Janos Blazi wrote:
> I am sure that much more peaple use Lisp today that ten years ago (though of
> course I could not prove that statement, I just feel it). (Many things seem
> to indicate this.) On the other hand the number of Lisp programmers
> compared to all programmers may have become less. I think it is very
> difficult to make a decent statement about such numbers.
I'm sure of that too. But that's not quite what I was worried about
(I may not have been clear). As the world (of computer users) is now
n times larger than it was, you can end up with there being no
community of people. Even though there are a lot of people doing Lisp
they can all be scattered off on their own. I'm particularly
concerned with teaching because I have some interest in it, but I
think it's important anyway because teachers are kind of what holds
the community together...
--tim
From: Jason Kantz
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <wkem9au2kk.fsf@kantz.com>
Philip Greenspun's ideas about online communities might be of interest ...
"What is a Community? What common features can we extract from the
above examples? A community is a group of people with varying degrees
of expertise in which the experts attempt to help the novices improve
their skills" http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/community.html
From: Paolo Amoroso
Subject: Re: New projects in CL (was Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l)
Date:
Message-ID: <Y0+wOCABZaYpGfHZkavLvb7JjbIO@4ax.com>
On 19 Feb 2000 20:50:35 +0000, Daniel Barlow <···@tninkpad.telent.net>
wrote:
> For any sourceforge-hosted project, it's usually a safe bet that it
> has a hostname of its own. Or at least, I don't know but it seems to
> work like that.
Only if the maintainer sets up a Web site. If not, SourceForge displays a
default page at http://myproject.sourceforge.net/ stating that the site is
not available yet. I seem to remember that one of the projects I mentioned
in my post doesn't have a site yet.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
On Sat, 19 Feb 2000 20:18:33 +0100, Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it>
wrote:
> Here are a few Common Lisp projects announced or started within the last
> couple of months:
Just after posting this message I noticed the article by Juan Jose Garcia
Ripoll announcing ECL-Spain, a fork from ECoLisp:
http://est202.sub37.uclm.es/jjgarcia/ecls.tgz
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
From: Marco Antoniotti
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <lw7lfyop1r.fsf@parades.rm.cnr.it>
Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> writes:
> * Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
>
> > I don't think so, but I might be wrong. My feeling is that there is no
> > active Lisp community any more. The Schemers seem to have some sort of
> > community, but not Common Lisp.
The Schemers need more of a community because they still have to
re-implement in a standardized way the missing 80% of CL. :)
> I think that's unduly depressing. There is at least *one* active Lisp
> community and this is it.
More or less.
> (And I think it's growing in fact, at least volume of news in c.l.l
> seems to be increasing)
I concur.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ===========================================
PARADES, Via San Pantaleo 66, I-00186 Rome, ITALY
tel. +39 - 06 68 10 03 17, fax. +39 - 06 68 80 79 26
http://www.parades.rm.cnr.it/~marcoxa
From: Bulent Murtezaoglu
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <87hff2v4lb.fsf@kapi.internal>
[...]
TB> (And I think it's growing in fact, at least volume of news in
TB> c.l.l seems to be increasing)
MA> I concur.
Me too. Why is this? Any ideas?
BM
From: Michael Livshin
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <s366vi4eoh.fsf@verisity.com>
Bulent Murtezaoglu <··@acm.org> writes:
> [...]
> TB> (And I think it's growing in fact, at least volume of news in
> TB> c.l.l seems to be increasing)
>
> MA> I concur.
>
> Me too. Why is this? Any ideas?
the root reason is the suckiness of all things M$.
it drove many reasonably smart people toward the open source world,
and now those of them with some aesthetic sense are looking for
something more elegant.
> BM
--mike
--
only legal replies to this address are accepted.
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
From: Johan Kullstam
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <m2ya8d1mt6.fsf@sophia.axel.nom>
Bulent Murtezaoglu <··@acm.org> writes:
> [...]
> TB> (And I think it's growing in fact, at least volume of news in
> TB> c.l.l seems to be increasing)
>
> MA> I concur.
>
> Me too. Why is this? Any ideas?
for a data point of one, i came to lisp because of
*) i was intrigued by emacs lisp extensions and learned a bit of lisp
for that.
*) the more i used it, the more dissatisfied with C++ i became.^1
*) i bought a perl book (the camel). i was *horrified* by the syntax
and dropped it before reading more than 50 pages. i just couldn't
go on.
*) once i started learning lisp, i was enchanted by its
expressiveness, symmetry and clean style.
erik naggum suggested common-lisp as an alternative (in the comp.emacs
newsgroup). i investigated lisp by getting the paul graham books,
cltl2, then norvig's paip. i like lisp because of its intrinsic
beauty. i really like the functional programming style -- very neat,
very powerful. i love mapcar and apply.
i don't do artificial intelligence, i mostly do number crunching.
fortunately, lisp is good for both.
the prefix math doesn't bother me -- as a mathematician it appeals to
my sense of elegance, as a programmer i appreciate its simplicity when
it comes time to write programs that write programs (macros).
besides, i've known since the 70s that infix loses. i've always used
hewlett-packard calculators and have a hard time operating the
"normal" kind.
now i am fond of lisp for its own sake rather than as a reaction to
C++ and perl. however, you've got to start somewhere. given that C++
and perl can be really horrifying and you have a wave of people
fleeing into the arms of lisp. it's kind of like the people fleeing
windows for unix.^2
[1] i have never understood object oriented programming -- especially
as done in C++. the syntax of C++ is imho daunting and the memory
management non-existant. i still don't really get the point, but
i can easily see that C++ made things harder than they need to be.
[2] unix sucks and it's only in comparison to ms-dos/windows that it
looks good. lisp actually *is* good.
--
J o h a n K u l l s t a m
[········@ne.mediaone.net]
Don't Fear the Penguin!
I am a computer science student at the University of Milan, Italy. What
follows are just my opinions. Any comments or corrections, Marco? (he
graduated at the same university)
On 17 Feb 2000 12:23:08 +0000, Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> wrote:
> current? My suspicion (based on some personal experience, but nothing
> statistically valid of course) is that a lot of lisp teaching is
> *enormously* out of date, and people are basically being taught ways
> of programming in Lisp which will cause them to reject it out of hand
> in favour of Java / C++ / whatever.
At my department there is a popular comparative programming languages
class. Until a few years ago the main textbook was:
"Programming Language Concepts" - 2nd Edition
Carlo Ghezzi, Mehdi Jazayeri
John Wiley & Sons, 1987
^^^^
The book devotes a bunch of pages to Lisp in the chapter on functional
programming. Nothing fancy, just the usual examples on list manipulation.
To let you judge how up to date the book is, here are some of the most
recent references taken from the bibliography (the classification is also
taken from the book):
Official language definition: CLtL1
Important papers: McCarthy's paper in the ACM SIGPLAN History of
Programming Languages 1978 Conference; "Programming in the Interactive
Environment: The LISP Experience" by E. Sandewall, ACM Computing Surveys,
March 1978.
Textbooks: "Programming in Common Lisp" by R. A. Brooks, Wiley, 1985.
And here are a few quotations from the text. From an overview of Lisp:
"There are several dialects that augment LISP with nonfunctional features."
Concerning data types: "LISP has two types of objects: atoms and lists".
Having said all that, the comparative programming languages class mentioned
above does _not_ cover Lisp. But if a student, bombarded by the hype for
the latest flashy language, happens to browse the book and bumps into the
Lisp section, you can easily guess what kind of impression he may get. The
class is now based on the 3rd edition of the book, but I wonder how up to
date it can be.
Sadly, my department had some Lisp tradition. A local hacker, for example,
developed a weird Lisp system named something like "Marco & <female name>
Lisp". And until a couple of years ago there was 1 (one) professor who
taught Scheme (that's how I got addicted; I tried to join a "Lisp
Anonymous" society, but without success :)
By the way, when in 1992 I first joined the student's lab, equipped with
HP-UX systems, I found two Common Lisp environments available. One was KCL.
The other was a commercial product, and I have been blaming myself for
years because I can't remember what system it was. It might have been a
mythical Lucid product. Unfortunately, at the time I had no interest in
Lisp.
> I was (naively) thinking that `being current' in Lisp might correlate
> quite well with reading c.l.l, as this seems to be the most active
I have been trying to convince professors to use newsgroups--not just Lisp
ones--for years, but without success. Not that I had more success with
_computer science_ students... they don't even use the news to cheat with
their homework :)
I can only speculate about the possible reasons. I think the main one is
that they consider using computers a clerical job. Secretaries and students
use computers, students write code and professors prove theorems.
Another reason is that professors may think that the only respectable way
of doing a scientific debate or keeping up to date with research is by
means of--printed--academic journals. Besides, references to journal papers
look better than Usenet posts in a resume. Compare the following references
:)
- "On the Semantics of NP-impossible Baby Nets", A.C. Ademe, Journal of
Computational Vacuum, March 1998
- "Re: peephole optimization _sucks_ [was: Re: Micro$oft is EVIL!!!!
(fwd)]", A.C Ademe, posted to comp.lang.jada on April 12, 1998
> are just hugely out of date (I mean 20 or 30 years, not 5 or 10), but
> I have no real evidence for this.
I have limited and anecdotal evidence that here people--in both academe and
industry--are around 20 years out of date concerning Lisp.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
From: Steve Long
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <38AC48B3.6BBB356B@isomedia.com>
Paolo Amoroso wrote:<snipped>
> I can only speculate about the possible reasons. I think the main one is
> that they consider using computers a clerical job. Secretaries and students
> use computers, students write code and professors prove theorems.
Hmmm. There are some "clerks" who live in my neighborhood (near Redmond, WA,
USA) who drive BMW's and live in very expensive houses.
Steve Long
It's McCarthy (as in John), and the paperback edition that has the 7090
assembly code for the interpreter in the back is the best!
faa
J.L. Perez-de-la-Cruz <····@apolo.lcc.uma.es> wrote in message
······················@apolo.lcc.uma.es...
>
>
> Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> > ... My suspicion (based on some personal experience, but nothing
> > statistically valid of course) is that a lot of lisp teaching is
> > *enormously* out of date,
>
> Not me, I'm pretty aware of the recent best-seller from MIT Press:
> MacCarthur's (sorry, I forgot the exact name) "LISP 1.5 Programmer's
> Manual"; it's a must!
>
> ---------------------
> Jose-Luis Perez-de-la-Cruz
> ETSI Informatica
> POB 4114
> MALAGA 29080 SPAIN
> Tlf +34 952 132801
> Fax +34 952 131397
> --------------------
······@x-ray.at (Reini Urban) writes:
> Our software course professor Lucas is very old and used to do a lot of
> LISP before ages (say in the 60's). Maybe that's why they teach SML and
> Java in the introductory courses instead of Lisp. But before we had
> Turbo Pascal. So things GOT better :)
And there was also the year of the C incident... As in the "Matrix"
movie: "They would not accept this reality - whole harvests were
lost." :-)
> However, somebody got excited about lisp, in contrast to ML/Java.
> He was forced to do a LISPM work during summer, that's why :)
> He gave a short intro into ACL (with emacs under linux for the language
> and with windows to see the other side of an IDE) and people liked it
> (of course).
Heh. But got lost when I tried to explain macros, mere weeks after
the lisp community [thread crossover] clobbered them into my thick
skull. Serves me right for talking about stuff before having _used_
it for some time.
> My personal opinion on this is that they favored ML over LISP because of
> the professors old experiences and maybe prejudices. But they certainly
> fear the students protests as well when they'll have to use yet another
> huge and terrible system. Everybody wants to learn C++ and maybe Delphi
> so the least common denominator was ML and Java.
As far as I can recall a private conversation with the professor the
choice was between Scheme (with Abelson/Sussman's SICP as text) and ML
(more "explicit", in-your-face as a language). Can't recall why ML
won out in the end, though. It's unlikely to be prejudice on
P. Lucas' part--at least he has CLtL1 on his personal bookshelf, so
knows about lexical scope and compilation. :-)
I wanted to write something like
<····················@news.uswest.net> (elsewhere in this thread), but
faa said it so much better. This is basically what the students are
told when they feel the need to complain.
But if anyone wants a shot at teaching Lisp in beginner / intermediate
courses...
http://www.iicm.tu-graz.ac.at/professor/
Rudi
From: Robert Monfera
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <38B00D47.43B2DF36@fisec.com>
Steve Long wrote:
> Except for the University of Washington.
I guess Washington State rather than D.C.? :-)
In article <·················@apolo.lcc.uma.es>, "J.L.
Perez-de-la-Cruz" <····@apolo.lcc.uma.es> wrote:
> Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> > ... My suspicion (based on some personal experience, but nothing
> > statistically valid of course) is that a lot of lisp teaching is
> > *enormously* out of date,
>
> Not me, I'm pretty aware of the recent best-seller from MIT Press:
> MacCarthur's (sorry, I forgot the exact name) "LISP 1.5 Programmer's
> Manual"; it's a must!
I got a copy. Just to stay at the leading edge. ;-)
Unfortunately the "Chinual" is out of print - **this**
would teach us something.
Rainer Joswig, ISION Internet AG, Harburger Schlossstrasse 1,
21079 Hamburg, Germany, Tel: +49 40 77175 226
Email: ·············@ision.de , WWW: http://www.ision.de/
From: Christian Lynbech
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <ofd7prdfv9.fsf@chl.tbit.dk>
>>>>> "Frank" == Frank A Adrian <·······@uswest.net> writes:
Frank> I also find your whining about the choice of language somewhat
Frank> amusing. Repeat after me, "The purpose of a University-level
Frank> course is to teach concepts of computing; not to train one in
Frank> the most popular language/development system of the day."
Not that this is terribly important, but it was not my intention to
whine about the choice of languages. What I wanted to whine about was
(to some extent at least) the idea that anybody would be able to
present a sample of languages, without singling out the personal
favourite. I know I couldn't.
What I find slightly puzzling is where in my previous post I said
anything about the merits of going for the popular language,
especially in the context of posting on comp.lang.lisp. Lisp is many
things, but "the most popular language/development system of the day."
is not an obvious part of it.
PS
I'll break down and admit it - I was a bit harsh on the reality of my
experiences. It was a good course and the professor was and is a
popular teacher.
---------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | Ericsson Telebit A/S
Fax: +45 8628 8186 | Fabrikvej 11, DK-8260 Viby J
Phone: +45 8738 2228 | email: ···@tbit.dk --- URL: http://www.tbit.dk
---------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- ·······@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
Christian Lynbech <···@tbit.dk> wrote in message
···················@chl.tbit.dk...
> Not that this is terribly important, but it was not my intention to
> whine about the choice of languages. What I wanted to whine about was
> (to some extent at least) the idea that anybody would be able to
> present a sample of languages, without singling out the personal
> favourite. I know I couldn't.
I apologize for the insinuation. It appeared to me as if this were another
one of the "The professor taught me in a language that I'll never use again"
rants. These items occur here perennially (often with Lisp as the target of
someone's misguided ire). It is no wonder a few of us who believe that Lisp
is a good language for teaching programming get a bit sensitive about this
argument, but to the extent that no such point was intended, I apologize.
As for personal taste in what one wants to use for OO language examples,
just be glad you weren't misguided by someone who thinks that C++ or Java
are the be-all and end-all of OO language design. You could do a LOT worse
than learning Beta.
> What I find slightly puzzling is where in my previous post I said
> anything about the merits of going for the popular language,
> especially in the context of posting on comp.lang.lisp. Lisp is many
> things, but "the most popular language/development system of the day."
> is not an obvious part of it.
Again, I apologize for my misinterpretation of your point.
> I'll break down and admit it - I was a bit harsh on the reality of my
> experiences. It was a good course and the professor was and is a
> popular teacher.
I am glad to hear it. It sounds as if he cares about the subject he's
teaching enough to try to buck the academic tide attempting to roll evermore
closely to the shores of success through mediocrity.
Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> * I wrote:
>
> What I'm really trying to find out is how lisp teaching works, in
> particular, how do people who are teaching lisp keep reasonably
> current? My suspicion (based on some personal experience, but nothing
> statistically valid of course) is that a lot of lisp teaching is
> *enormously* out of date, and people are basically being taught ways
> of programming in Lisp which will cause them to reject it out of hand
> in favour of Java / C++ / whatever.
>
> (...)
>
> My intuition is that it *does* matter, somehow, and that there is
> currently a real problem, specifically in Lisp teaching, where people
> are just hugely out of date (I mean 20 or 30 years, not 5 or 10), but
> I have no real evidence for this.
>
> I'd be interested in knowing what people think about this...
That's quite an interesting view. I think it all depends on what the
teachers' background is and what Lisp is taught for. If you're teaching an
AI programming module and use CL for your own research work (and read this
newsgroup :-), that's would be the way you keep current.
Now, what you mean by "ways of programming in Lisp" would deserve some
explanations, because there are matters of style, matters of programming
techniques and other aspects that depend on the evolution of CL itself.
Everyone would recognise the shift in style between Charniak et al's "AI
Programming" and Norvig's "AI Programming". But this is not to say that
some of the programming techniques in the former should not be used/taught
today.
Also, as your favourite Lisp system tends to be shipped with Paul Graham's
books instead of the usual reference manual, it is hard to believe that
many people could be unaware of "modern" Lisp style/techniques ?
Don't you find more worrying that until recently some Java courses were
taught by Lecturers who could not have claimed to have written a
subtantial number of LOCs in the idiom :-)
Marc
From: ; helmer . . .
Subject: Re: People teaching lisp in academia who read c.l.l
Date:
Message-ID: <88kfui$kqp$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
I'm new to lisp and programming and am well past a masters degree in
music. I wasn't really interested in programming until I started seeing
and learning about lisp (ref. ai).
I thought I saw on a lisp resource web site documetation about a
convention recently (past few years) in the NW, so there's activity, and
this is the community take it or leave it, I for one am not concerned
about the destiny of lisp, and 20 years outmoded still teaches me
something!!! Yes believe it or not, am enjoying the present . . .
--
; helmer . . .
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
>>>>> "Tim" == Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> writes:
Tim> I'm interested how many people teaching Lisp (specifically CL,
Tim> but I guess other non-Scheme Lisps too) in academia read c.l.l
Tim> regularly.
I teach Common Lisp (sadly, the only class _on_ CL -- it's obviously
_used_ in other classes, though far too few in my view) at Ohio State.
I taught it for the first time last year -- it's offered only once per
year -- and in April, it'll begin again. Interestingly, it looks like
the enrollment in the class is much higher than last year, (It's
obviously too early to see for sure.) I think in no small part due to
last year's students telling their friends to take it.
It seems that for the past few years, it has been taught, probably
competently enough, by folks who don't really read c.l.l regularly or
otherwise consider themselves to be Lisp hackers. Most of the
students in my class last year were shocked to see my presentation.
Basically, in the beginning of the course, I asserted that the
languages they claim to know, C++ in the most common case, suck canal
water, and that in the course, they'd learn why. I put myself on
something of a mission not only to teach people Common Lisp's
facilities and syntax -- this can be had from any decent book -- but
to help them to see the world through Common Lisp's eyes. Optimally,
I hope to give students a completely different view of the world of
programming. Common Lisp works well for this purpose because it's
really a different kind of language from the sort of cruft that seems
to get all of the attention from the mainstream industry.
(This is admittedly a pretty ambitious goal, given that it's a one
credit-hour class that lasts only a quarter. However, several
students said they'd like to see a followup course where we actually
get to use the language a lot more, on bigger projects, instead of on
relatively small projects where we must focus on a very small part of
the language. I take this as a good sign that I helped to convey some
of my enthusiasm for Lisp.)
I also changed the text from Wilensky's "Common LISPcraft" to Graham's
"ANSI Common Lisp", which I think does a _much_ better job of
presenting the philosophy of Lisp and conveying the sorts of ideas
that I think are important to understand beyond how the language
works. There was even a bit in Wilensky's text that talked about the
lack of "mystical significance" of LAMBDA, which I found infinitely
disappointing. I told my students not to believe what's in the book,
adding "bow down to LAMBDA" for emphasis. Instead of ridding
ourselves and our tools of humor and magic, we should be finding ways
to add such things.
Whilst on the topic of books that convey the beauty of Lisp, I've been
reading "Simply Scheme". I'm using that to teach (informally) people
who don't have enough background to handle "ANSI Common Lisp" or the
Wizard book how to program. "Simply Scheme" really is a delight.
--
Matt Curtin ········@interhack.net http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/