Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: vrotney@netcom.com (William Paul Vrotney)
Subject: Re: Monopoly = Success
In-Reply-To: shrager@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu's message of 9 Sep 1996 01:24:41 GMT
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Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 00:12:27 GMT
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In article <50vrkp$5s4@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> shrager@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu (Jeff Shrager) writes:
> 
> This is a good step, but the features don't really differ so much that
> it's worth having so many whole new implementations!  All the major
> ones are just CL by some other name with very slight
> incompatibilities.  I've used about 20 lisps now in as many years and
> haven't had to relearn the language once; just spend a week trying to
> find and bring up the closest and most convenient implementation for
> my platform -- which is never close nor convenient.  In the real world
> you type "cc" (or gcc) on *any* unix box and you win; you run qbasic
> on *any* dos box and you win.  You bring up the same VB everywhere!  I
> can't believe that there's any reason to have 12 slightly different
> lisp implementations, none of them fully supported and on all major
> platforms.

This this not fully correct.  If a Common Lisp was installed on a machine
and you type "cl" or "gcl" you usually win unless your system administrators
did a bad job.  And it doesn't make sense to use something that is already
there versus something that is more powerful but needs to be installed.  For
example it is silly to use "vi" over Emacs only because "vi" is usually
there and you sometimes have to install Emacs.

Common Lisp was invented to serve just that purpose that you complain about.
However I will admit that I have often complained that Common Lisp should
have been defined in two levels: Level 0 containing all of the special forms
and minimal functions and Level 1 containing all of the rest that could be
defined in terms of Level 0.  If you *really* think about it there are *far*
more dialect of C and C++ if you consider the myriad of very different C and
C++ libraries that exits.  Since Common Lisp essentially defines the
equivalent of these libraries with only one consistent definition then by
your way of thinking Common Lisp is a bigger win than C or C++ since all of
those C and C++ library choices are not always there (nor could they be!).

> 
> Whichever.  This is my point exactly.  The answer to: "How do I run
> lisp?"  Is: "Well, it's a long story, beginning with: Which one?"
> Which is annoying to us heavy lisp users, embarassing to the
> community, and is going to make lisp extinct.
> 

Quite the opposite.  Lisp has always been an evolving language which is why
it may outlive others like C++ and Java.  The idea of a Common Lisp is just
a sanity check in that evolution, but also it satifies your requirements
above.

The reasons why Lisp *appears* to becoming extinct was discussed in this
newsgroup before.  The consensus was that the reasons were more political
than pragmatic.  But politics swings radically which is why I predict that
Lisp will be rediscovered in the future.  If Lisp is a genuinely good idea,
and it seems to be since it has survived for so long, then it will not
become extinct, since genuinely good ideas do not become extinct.  Unless of
course they are hit by a meteor.

-- 

William P. Vrotney - vrotney@netcom.com
