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From: vogt@netcom.com (Christopher J. Vogt)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Message-ID: <vogtCy1qq7.517@netcom.com>
Organization: Kalantha, Inc.
References: <Pine.A32.3.91.941014091539.42306C-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> <hbakerCxquDG.LEF@netcom.com> <Cxxwx0.1nC@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <hbakerCy17CC.vx@netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 23:32:31 GMT
Lines: 75

In article <hbakerCy17CC.vx@netcom.com>,
Henry G. Baker <hbaker@netcom.com> wrote:

> [...]
>
>The Lisp community also ran head-on into the 'the minimum is the
>maximum' problem which is characteristic of all government edicts.
>Whenever a standard of behavior is set, and there are a number of
>competitors, the weakest competitor is now in a position to hold back
>progress of everyone else in the name of 'compatibility'.  Any
>competitor which attempts to move out in front runs the very real risk
>of the other competitors ganging up on him in the standards committee
>to ensure that his 'improvements' will have to be retracted, or at the
>very least, undergo significant and expensive changes.  In such a
>situation, the pioneer is quickly identified by the number of arrows
>in his back.
>
>Standards committees should _follow_, not lead.  The best standards
>are _de facto_ standards, which have already developed as a result of
>consensus.
>
>Languages which don't change are dead.  Latin has been standardized
>for years.  (Doesn't it bother anyone else that people who are really
>good at Latin tend to gravitate to standards committees?)  Lisp grew
>and prospered _because_ it was able to quickly change and adopt good
>ideas from other languages.  The whole point of standards committees
>are to _freeze_ a language at a certain point in time -- e.g.,
>Fortran-66, Fortran-77, etc.  This guarantees that all new ideas will
>now have to come from _outside_ that community -- e.g., all of
>Fortran's ideas are now stolen from C, Lisp, Ada, FP, etc.  Lisp was,
>and should remain, a _leader_ in exploring new ideas, and traditional
>language standards are incompatible with this goal.

I disagree that standardizing Lisp will inhibit it's usefulness for exploring 
new ideas.  In terms of syntactic issues, Lisp macros make it easy
to continue to explore, and present readily portable new ideas.  I think
the bigger risk is that no standard is forthcoming, and the language dies
due to lack of portability.  If all you want to do is research hacking it's
fine to do without standardization, but if you want to develop and deliver
applications it is an entirely different matter.

OTOH, if you are right, at least we can look forward to the death of C.

It seems to me that the standardization serves a useful
purposes.  It allows one to write an application and deliver
it on multiple platforms with a minimum of grief.

> 
>In my mind, probably the biggest _disservice_ that (D)ARPA did to the
>programming language community was to try to force-feed 'standards'.
>It is now impossible to get research funds to do programming
>_language_ research, unless you give the language an entirely new
>name, and hide it in new syntax.  There's plenty of money for
>compiling old languages, or for 'application-specific' languages (when
>else am I going to get to use that neat lex/yacc stuff that they
>taught me in CS301?), but not for new ideas in existing 'standard'
>languages.

I agree that ARPA is FUBAR'd in this regard.

>After nearly 50 years of software, we have obviously already found
>_all_ of the important techniques, C++ and Smalltalk are the solution
>for all computing problems, and the only things remaining are a bit of
>mopping up.  Dijkstra/Hoare/Goldberg/Stroustrup have found all there is
>to find, and the rest of us need look no farther.

;-)

> [...]



-- 
Christopher J. Vogt vogt@netcom.com
From: El Eh, CA
