Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.lisp.mcl,comp.lang.lisp.franz,comp.lang.lisp.x,comp.lang.clos
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!fas-news.harvard.edu!newspump.wustl.edu!news.ecn.bgu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!noc.netcom.net!netcom.com!NewsWatcher!user
From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Lisp considered too hard
Message-ID: <hbaker-0706951733440001@192.0.2.1>
Sender: hbaker@netcom17.netcom.com
Organization: nil
References: <hbaker-0206950511260001@192.0.2.1> <3qnek3$mk@Yost.com> <3r20a2$mp@Yost.com> <3r289d$jup@ornews.intel.com> <3r3995$1dn@Yost.com> <gclements-0706950901150001@mac21_58.keps.com>
Distribution: inet
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 01:33:44 GMT
Lines: 78
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:18036 comp.lang.lisp.mcl:7154 comp.lang.lisp.franz:508 comp.lang.lisp.x:1550 comp.lang.clos:3176

In article <gclements-0706950901150001@mac21_58.keps.com>,
gclements@keps.com (Geoffrey Clements) wrote:

> In article <3r3995$1dn@Yost.com>, yost@Yost.com (Dave Yost) wrote:
> 
> > In article <3r289d$jup@ornews.intel.com>,
> > Patrick Logan <pdlogan@ornews.intel.com> wrote:
> > >Dave Yost (yost@Yost.com) wrote:
> > >
> > >: Lisp is considered too hard for most programmers,
> > >
> > >Guess what, from what I've seen during twelve years in the industry,
> > >*programming* is too hard for most programmers.

> I've programmed in a few different langauges and worked with a bunch of
> different programmers. I find that too many of those programmers used the
> "try stuff until it works" debugging method. They try something. OK that
> doesn't work. They try something else. Ok that doesn't work. So they try
> something else. That works. Bug fixed. This makes a huge mess of a piece
> of software because it turns a relatively straight forward piece of code,
> that may have not covered every contingency, into a patchwork of partial
> fixes.
> 
> I absolutely hate coming onto a project and seeing code like this. In most
> cases I end up rewritting huge protions of the code. I usually finish
> before someone who is just fixing things because I turn the messy
> patchwork into clean simple code and they just fight the patchwork.
> 
> > >I am not kidding. Any language. Most can't do it very well,
> > >and I'm tired of dealing with those who can't.
> 
> Me too.
> 
> > There is another side to this story, though.
> > There are programmers that are so smart and so fast,
> > that they have little regard for leaving something
> > clean and readable behind for themselves or others
> > to develop further.  Would you say that programming
> > is too hard for such a person?

What?  You don't like program development by debugging a blank sheet of
paper (or a blank screen)?  Neither did many of the people that saw Lisp
in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  Such development didn't follow
established practise, it didn't conform to the 'waterfall' model, etc.,
it didn't use 'static typing', etc.

So where are we today?  People _love_ development by debugging blank
screens, so the newest tools for 'Visual Cxx' support this mode.  This
mode has become almost classical, now that it has the fashionable name
of 'fast prototyping'.  So the bullshit reasons why people didn't like
Lisp are just plain _wrong_, because nearly every one of these ideas is
heavily used today.

No, I think the real reason why people don't like Lisp is that people
(especially researchers at large companies and large universities) don't
like to admit that they were wrong, and that some snot-nosed kids got it
right the first time, perhaps decades before they did.  Therefore, after
5-10 years and a blizzard of technical papers, they change the names of
things and start touting the same things that Lisp had first.

Remember garbage collection?  Remember interpreters and incremental
debugging?  Remember incremental compilers?  Remember incremental loading?
(I could go on for _days_.)

People complain about 5 Megabyte 'hello world' programs.  Have you ever
measured the size of a RISC 'hello world' program that runs on a GUI
interface these days, with X-Windows (or equivalent), etc., etc.?  You
might be shocked and amazed.

The 8 Mbyte main memories required to run Lisp Machine Lisp grossed everyone
out in 1980.  But look at what it takes to run MS Windows these days!
16 Mbytes!  So it isn't the _language_ that cost all of the memory, but
the _functionality_.  And I'll bet that Lisp was at least an order of
magnitude more efficient in its use of that memory than MS Windows is.

-- 
www/ftp directory:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html
