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From: moroz@inist.ru (Oleg Moroz)
Subject: Re: Lisp is alive, was "Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation"
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Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1996 16:29:56 GMT
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On Sat, 07 Sep 1996 02:08:04 +0200, joswig@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) wrote:

>Why did people port Lisp to Mainframes or SIMD machines? Just for
>fun?

I really think that it was mostly for fun. While functional languages _are_ real
good for parallelism and SIMD architectures in particular, (Common) Lisp is as
far from the word "functional" as Smalltalk or Pascal is.

>Why is the CMU archive full of Lisp stuff?

Why are FTP sites of the world full of free C/C++ stuff ? The ratio is not on
the Lisp side :-)

>If you look closely you will find them. Otherwise it would
>be unexplainable, why there are so many Lisp implementations.
>Or can you tell, why there are still Common Lisp vendors?
>How do they manage to pay their employees? Somebody
>buys this stuff.

You don't need to look closely to find C/C++/Fortran/... - based applications.
Most non-commercial Lisp implementation are done just for the implementor's fun.
Others are usually written in universities by a group of enthusiastic
implementors that get some funding for the project that needs Lisp (in their
opinion). 

Commercial versions of Lisp exist in the small market niche that is
self-supported, much analogous to the market niche of mainframe computers and
"real" OOD tools. They are working with couple hundred of buyers (historically
devoted to their product) each, getting major bucks for every copy to cover R&D
and support costs, supporting in their products just what this limited group of
customers needs. This explains their ten-twenty year old user interfaces and
strong cross-platform orientation. The latter (bad thing in my opinion) implies
slow (if any) adoption of new operating system features, once again poor UI,
usually restricted by the common denominator of what's available on all
supported systems, and the tendency to ignore completely the  issues of
shrink-wrapped distribution of the software developed on this system.

>Saying "I like CL" is kind of childish. I use CL, because
>I do have a need for an interactive development system.
>I can quite comfortably explore my ideas using CL.
>If you can't - well - be happy and use something else
>that is more suitable to your problem.

I like Scheme and I like Smalltalk and I like Haskell and it's not childish at
all. If I could do all the things I do at work in one of the languages I really
like, I would be much more happy than I am right now. The obstacle is not the
language itself, it's the particular misfeatures of available implementations /
development environments. I feel from my "hobby" experience that I could be much
more productive with, say, Lisp instead of C++ given the IDE of the same power
and capabilities that I have now. Pity, there is none.

>Btw, we *really* need a web site that people see Lisp is still alive.

What we really need is some work done in implementing really modern Lisp
development environments that suit the developers now targetting C/C++ and using
these to implement real applications that most people use everyday. Just talking
about Lisp be it in computer magazines, on the WWW site or on the radio won't
buy Lisp an ounce of popularity. It probably will support the corpse alive for
some time... Flatlined...

Oleg
