"torve" <···········@gmail.com> writes:
> Hi,
>
> while reading the canonical Lisp-family success stories again and again
> in all the well known places (naughty dog, the yahoo shop,
> the-not-yet-so-canonical bayesian spam filter), I'd like to know what
> failures (small and large) people have experienced or know of while and
> after deciding on Lisp as an implementation language. Excluded from the
> question are failures based on unwillingness to properly indent code
> ("couldn't get used to the silly parens") or ignorance of FFI ("there
> are no libraries"). Do you have encountered serious problems that made
> you abandon a project or wish to have chosen a different language
> (anything, Perl, Haskell, C++)?
Most CL failures are based not on technical issued or the quality
of the language itself, but more on management politics or
perceived economics:
1. Management hates Lisp, based on their bad experience with AI
in the late '80s and early '90s
2. Management perceives that their Lisp code base is not
maintainable, due to a perceived lack of Lisp programmer
availability (all you Lisp programmers who would like a Lisp
job, raise your hand :-)
3. We Lisp programmers tend to be odd ducks; and since we have
so much programming power, and since many times we tend to be
arrogant, management tends to be afraid of us. Having been a
manager myself, and given a choice between a small department
of highly effective but unpredictable geniuses and a large
department of homogenous, average, _replaceable_ programmers,
I'd really have a hard choice to make. Other managers would
not find the choice hard at all. More than 50% would choose
the homogenous interchangeable department.
There are probably others. There are a few technical reasons
why Lisp isn't chosen for certain areas, but I don't consider
these failures; I consider them opportunities, most of which
we (Franz Inc and others) are working on.
--
Duane Rettig ·····@franz.com Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/
555 12th St., Suite 1450 http://www.555citycenter.com/
Oakland, Ca. 94607 Phone: (510) 452-2000; Fax: (510) 452-0182
On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 08:55:08 -0700, Duane Rettig <·····@franz.com>
wrote:
> 1. Management hates Lisp, based on their bad experience with AI
>in the late '80s and early '90s
I once had a manager who barred Lisp from consideration because of an
experience as an engineer working on a film printer which was
originally programmed using some version of Lisp. Apparently the
software was so slow and resource intensive that it couldn't be used.
After several unsuccessful tries, the Lisp programmers were fired, the
software was rewritten in C and the company banned the use of Lisp.
That negative experience was so powerful that even many years later
this person still shudders at the very mention of Lisp.
George
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