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From: chen@cs.cornell.edu (Zewei (Wilfred) Chen)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Message-ID: <1994Sep21.192607.11151@cs.cornell.edu>
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
References: <LYNBECH.94Sep15223604@xenon.daimi.aau.dk> <os2Psc1w165w@sytex.com> <35dcf9$jao@news.aero.org> <1994Sep19.221325.3567@cabell.vcu.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 19:26:07 GMT
Lines: 33

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.

There is no need to have the same environment (hardware or software
platform) for developers and users.  It seems that Lisp can still
become popular in the not-too-distant future by providing more tools
for converting or porting prototypes in Lisp into production versions
in other languages.  For one thing, the full capacity of garbage
collection is rarely needed for each particular program.  Some open
research problems might need be solved before one can generate memory
management code customized for particular programs.  So, perhaps,
after a program is prototyped in Lisp, which is a good language for
exploratory programming on powerful machines that software developers
can afford, one can use it as a basis for rapidly generating code in
some other language that is well supported on cheaper and less
powerful platforms, such as PCs.

Zewei Chen
