Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: davis@ilog.fr (Harley Davis)
Subject: Re: ANSI CLtL Document (Re: HTML text of CLTL2?)
In-Reply-To: barmar@nic.near.net's message of 13 May 1995 23:59:42 -0400
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References: <MARCOXA.95May10092506@liberty.cs.nyu.edu> <3p16bh$va@tools.near.net>
	<MARCOXA.95May13095503@mosaic.nyu.edu> <3p3v7e$3i1@tools.near.net>
Date: 15 May 1995 13:46:50 GMT


In article <3p3v7e$3i1@tools.near.net> barmar@nic.near.net (Barry Margolin) writes:

   Textbooks, vendor documentation, and mass market books are the expected
   ways that most people will learn about a language.  As an analogy, how many
   people bother to get the ANSI standards for office furniture (yes, there
   are such standards) before buying rolling chairs?  Do you think more people
   would buy them if they lowered the prices?

The difference, of course, is that rolling chair users don't need to
know what's in the standard, but language users (ie programmers) do.
I don't think the standard standards model (so to speak) holds up too
well when there are so many users of the standard, and especially so
many neophyte ones.  Software is a very immature industry.

Also, in the particular case of Common Lisp, I would have thought that
its proponents would make a more active effort to disseminate complete
information about it, including the standard (as they did during the
standards process itself with the draft and Steele's book's text).
This sudden shutting off of information will certainly have a bad
impact in the growth (?) of Common Lisp.

Whether the publishers of textbooks and other descriptive books about
Common Lisp will consider it worthwhile to update them to take into
account the new standard is an open question, and may also be
influenced by their perception of the inaccessibility of the standard
document.  Or maybe not.

Just my meandering thoughts,

-- Harley Davis
-- 

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