Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
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Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 16:07:43 +0000
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In article <1994Sep19.221325.3567@cabell.vcu.edu>
           csc1alf@cabell.vcu.edu "Adrian L. Flanagan" writes:

> 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.

I agree about the need for speed and small a "footprint". At one
time, all the reviews of C compilers that I found would measure
of number of bytes for a "Hello, World" program. This was to see
how much library overhead there was, which means very little when
see object code sizes of more than a megabyte. The object code for
many leading apps these days tend to be at least this big.

The IDDE, the grahical front end, for the C++ compiler I use is
about 1 MB, and that's not counting the compiler and linker etc,
which are in their own DLL files. My machine can barely run the
IDDE, as it only has 8 MB of RAM. It does not run well, and yet
this is nothing compared to VC++.

Someone once said that "Lisp programmers know the value of every
thing, and the cost of nothing". This may be a gross generalisation,
but there may be some truth in it. I might say that C programmers
know the cost of everything, and the value of nothing, and that
would also be a gross generalisation. There also might be some
truth in it. Think of those byte counting compiler reviews. Now
imagine if Lisp systems were review with the same attention to
object code size.

I know, there's a different culture. In Lisp, you might not want
stand alone programs. You might simply call a function, instead
of launching an application. It might even look the same! That
was how Smalltalk-80 was intended to be used, but today, a modern
Smalltalk works a little differently. Smalltalk/V is a good example
of what I mean, and yet it is still judged by the standards set
by C programmers, who are still counting bytes.

Also note how the user interface ideas, like the desktop metaphor,
were taken from Smalltalk, but the idea of all code being part of
the system and not making a special distinction between system
code and app code wasn't adopted by Apple, Microsoft, etc.

If you underestimate that cutural difference, you may have to
pay for it. I hope you don't, but I can't find as many jobs
offered for Smalltalk/Lisp/Prolog as there are for C/C++/VB.
I could just be looking in the wrong places, but I would still
advise any vendor to look closely at what makes their product
different from, let's say, Microsoft's.

Perhaps Apple have thought about this. The design of the Dylan
language suggests to me that they have. I hope that it succeeds,
as I'm told that Smalltalk programmers are paid more than C/C++
programmers, and Dylan might well do better than Smalltalk as
a pure object orientted language. ;-)

Martin Rodgers
-- 
Future generations are relying on us
It's a world we've made - Incubus	
We're living on a knife edge, looking for the ground -- Hawkwind
