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From: smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Message-ID: <uPkXsc1w165w@sytex.com>
Sender: bbs@sytex.com
Organization: Sytex Access Ltd.
References: <1994Sep19.221325.3567@cabell.vcu.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 02:57:05 GMT
Lines: 37

csc1alf@cabell.vcu.edu (Adrian L. Flanagan) writes:

> 
> I must strenously disagree with the original poster.  "Blazing
> speed,space,etc." are that critical.  Particularly in the PC DOS
> world with its 640K restriction, program size and efficiency of
> compiled code made a tremendous market difference in acceptance of
> early commercial programs.  Programmers writing in C had a large
> advantage over programmers using the early Lisp systems, and lesser
> but still significant advantages over Pascal programmers (although
> some commercial apps were written in Turbo Pascal).  Casual users
> may have been better off using Lisp, but they wanted to use what the
> "big boys" were using, and the vendors of support tools followed the
> pro developers.
> 
> The (relative) failure of Lisp has everything to do with Lisp
> vendors' failure to understand (even now) the needs of their
> marketplace.  Call it Ivory Tower Syndrome.
> -- 
> A. Lloyd Flanagan  a.k.a. "Wild Card"
> Think:  What you do when you can't thwim.  -- Dexter's Disturbed Dictionary

Howdy,
       1. Right. DOS+640K definitely gives advantage to C/Pascal/Asm.
Esp with TSR's and other weirdnesses. My question refered to the folks,
though, who are using VB and VC and BCW4.0 _now_ - big environments and
big images. I like the general historical picture, though.
        2. When I say "no blazing speed", I mean -- "Not hard realtime".
I'm assuming only a 2X to 3X speed avantage of native C over compiled
Lisp. Any body ever benchmark Allegro vs. Borland C++ on say TAK ?
        3. "Ivory Tower Syndrom" -- YES! Now I think we'er getting to
the heart of the matter ;-)

=============================================
Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
=============================================
