Just got this forwarded from a forward from an emagazine, grace a the
redoutable Jay Sulzberger:
"SD Devtalk: Lisp Lives, Fool with a Tool and Bruce Schneier on Homeland Se
March 2004; Volume 5, Number 3
Lisp Lives!
[Don't Be a Fool with a Tool]
[Bruce Schneier Talks Homeland Security]
[SD Best Practices 2004]
Lisp Lives!
No longer linked only to AI, the language is enjoying resurgence in a
wide range of arenas.
Statement and answer on the SD West show floor.
Nostalgia hit when I saw Franz Lisp evangelists on the show floor at the
SD West 2004 Expo sporting (got-lisp-p) black t-shirts with the simple
answer, t, on the back. I thought Lisp was dead by association-at one
time it was synonymous with AI, and we all know that sad tale of great
expectations. But take another look! According to Sheng-Chuan Wu,
Franz's Vice President of corporate development, the language has
moved from research and development / academic / prototyping environments
to commercial, revenue-generating applications. "Lisp is a good
solution for lots of commercial applications," Wu says, "and
its three to five times faster to develop applications in Lisp
than in Java and C++. In the last 10 years, its become a
general-purpose programming language used in many modern and most of the
time, very complex, applications."
Furthermore, Wu says, "People say 'Java is the gateway to the
Internet.' We say 'Java is the gateway to hell.' Lisp
is just a better alternative to the intelligent Internet: It runs on 14
different platforms and doesnt need any type of virtual machine
because it compiles directly to native machine instructions on all
popular microprocessor architectures."
Investigating what's been happening in the world of Lisp, I found a
variety
of successful programs that attest to its solid performance. Notable
among
them, Ascent Technology's mission-critical decision support systems
run the
gamut of real-time decision support for gate and ground resource
allocation, aircraft routing, tracking and maintenance scheduling for
clients in the air transportation industry. According to Philippe Brou,
Ascent executive vice president and cofounder, the attitude toward
Lisp has
changed significantly over the last two decades. "Now, customers
understand that as long as the system satisfies all their needs (in terms
of features, performance and reliability), the language decision is
somewhat irrelevant." He adds, "We've always used Lisp in all our decision
support applications-from our very first system delivered 17 years ago, to
our latest personnel allocation system, which can handle tens of thousands
of workers in real-time."
Lisp has also evolved from its origins as merely a desktop application
embedding both decision logic and the GUI to a multitier architecture that
combines Oracle on the back end, middleware layers (XML, IBM WebSphere MQ,
Java, Corba), Web technology (JSP, Java, HTML) and back-end Lisp
decision-support engines running on servers. According to Brou, the more
sophisticated the system, the more probable it is that Lisp could be used
to implement it. "Anyone involved with applications where the
complexity of
the logic is very high is at least likely to consider Lisp as a viable
option. Lisp provides tremendous productivity advantages, better time to
market and easier handling of programming fixes: Its clearly a competitive
advantage for many vendors. Its also easy for new programmers to learn, so
recruiting isn't a problem, either."
Wu listed a slew of commercial applications based on Common Lisp (CL) in
such diverse domains as gaming, energy and manufacturing. Nintendo's
Super
Mario 64 and Naughty Dog's (now part of Sony Entertainment) blockbuster
games Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy are all
built in CL, along with advisory systems for nuclear power plants,
chemical
plants, steelworks and others. It was used in the automatic redesign
of the
entire airframe of the new Boeing 777, as well as in audit planning
systems. The scheduling system behind the amazingly successful Hubble
telescope is also written in CL, as are the scheduling systems for major
airports such as Heathrow and Atlanta, and the logistics system deployed
during the first Gulf War. CL is preferred by many complex bioinformatics
applications, such as SRIs EcoCyc, which encodes and displays the entire
metabolic pathways of the E. coli bacteria, as well as Harvard Children's
Hospital Informatics Program's SNPper, which aids scientists in
analysis of
single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Clearly, it's time to take another look at Lisp. And, if anyone thinks
that
there are no new frontiers that can generate dynasties like Microsoft,
just
listen to what Bill Gates advised computer science majors at MIT early
this
year in a question-answer session: "If you invent a breakthrough in
artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that [will be] worth 10
Microsofts."
Auntie Lisp was seen dancing on a table at the show reception. C'mon
people, the old girl's been in the attic for twenty years, use some
judgment when she heads for the open bar.
slim kenny
--
Home? http://tilton-technology.com
Cells? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Cello? http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cello/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application
Kenny Tilton <·······@nyc.rr.com> writes:
> Furthermore, Wu says, "People say 'Java is the gateway to the
> Internet.' We say 'Java is the gateway to hell.' Lisp
> is just a better alternative to the intelligent Internet: It runs on 14
> different platforms and doesnt need any type of virtual machine
> because it compiles directly to native machine instructions on all
> popular microprocessor architectures."
I believe this is a play on a comment made by Richard Gabriel during
his fill-in presentation for Guy Steele at the 1999 LUGM. The context
of this statement was a talk that dealt extensively with the notion of
a "topos". (See http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html for
further details on this concept.) The "gateway to the Internet" was
described as the story which Java derived its popularity through. The
"gateway to AI" was posed as being Lisp's story, and "AI is hell" the
reason that story did not work so well any more.