Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)
Subject: Re: Dylan Implementations
Message-ID: <Lk73sc2w165w@sytex.com>
Sender: bbs@sytex.com
Organization: Sytex Access Ltd.
References: <19940922T234610Z.erik@naggum.no>
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 03:37:08 GMT
Lines: 43

Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> writes:

> Dylan, good luck.  Apple, thanks for still having the guts to be innovative.
> 
> #<Erik>
> --
> Microsoft is not the answer.  Microsoft is the question.  NO is the answer.

Howdy,
        Yes. Innovation is a GOOD THING. I read somewhere that we are
now simply in an age of "conservatism" with regard to software 
technology and that this is cyclical -- sounded about accurate to
me. 
        OTOH - some of us look at the tree of LISP derived languages
and we see that the root there is dated around 1955 and we begin
to wonder "Hey, what's going on here? Why haven't _any_ of the
leaves of this tree seen widespread commercial use." My origianl
posting asked _both_ a practical and theoretical question. The
theoretical question regards the intersection of this tree of
tools (or lack of intersection) and the history of commercially
successful (better term than "popular"?) development tools.
        I don't want to risk misquote, but over in comp.lang.lisp
Thomas Breuel made a comment to the effect that once we have 
extra space/cpu resources, we often just want to solve even 
bigger problems -- so the "extra overhead" traditionally 
associated with LISP like languages on stock hardware might
_always_ be a problem.
        There are (as usual) two responses: (1) There are other
classes of apps being built where this problem doesn't apply -
say the oodles of small to medium financial models and other
custom apps now built using Pascal, C, Basic, etc. (2) Implementations
might theoretically eliminate much of this overhead "as the science
matures."
        I was asking more about the (1) possibility rather than
the (2) possibility, or at least limiting (2) to what is now
feasible rather than just "possible".
        Anyway - YES, grow the tree. It's just nice to eat fruit
sometimes as well.

=============================================
Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
=============================================
