Reddit rewritten in Python
Ravi
Bill Atkins
nall...@gmail.com
Adam Connor
nall...@gmail.com wrote:
> http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html
Seems like the core of it is that they wanted to be rooted in a bigger
community, with the associated libraries, etc.
Adam Connor
to stick with Lisp, it is going to make other folks wonder why they
should bother even considering it. So, it's very unfortunate.
Ulrich Hobelmann
But if the Lisp version is more readable and extensible, it should be
easy to mirror whatever features the Python people will add. ;)
That'd be more of a nice showcase.
--
Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
M Jared Finder
> http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html
>
> here is a longer post describing why they switched
Sounds like they had two very valid reasons to switching away from Lisp:
* A lack of cross-platform threading and networking libraries.
* A lack of an existing community on which to borrow code examples from.
The lack of cross-platform threading and networking must be a huge pain
when developing a web application.
-- MJF
Marc Battyani
"Adam Connor" <ad...@austin.rr.com> wrote:
IMO they started with Lisp just to please PG. Their reasons to switch are
pretty lame. Don't tell me they couldn't afford to buy a commercial Lisp for
instance.
Marc
jayessay
Sort of as an aside here, but has anyone else wasted a little time
over on c.l.p lately and seen the ongoing thread about poor
"packaging" for python and its libs? If you substituted "Lisp" for
"Python" you could easily be confused into thinking you were on c.l.l,
both from the "trolls" writings and the responses to them. Go figure.
/Jon
--
'j' - a n t h o n y at romeo/charley/november com
jayessay
> I might add... if the folks in a PG-associated startup aren't convinced
> to stick with Lisp, it is going to make other folks wonder why they
> should bother even considering it.
Why? PG seems to really like Python and is also on record as not much
liking Common Lisp. May not be surprising at all given this.
Admin Snewton
> pretty lame. Don't tell me they couldn't afford to buy a commercial Lisp for
> instance.
That is completely false. We used Lisp because I was interested in
Lisp, and that was long before the SFP or reddit. I still love Lisp
Yes, we could *afford* to buy a commercial Lisp, but we didn't want to.
Rainer Joswig
in LsmdneoaSZs...@speakeasy.net:
Especially if you deploy on exactly one operating system and one hardware
platform, this is a huge pain. Also if you take from the community, but
aren't prepared to give back. And also when you got funding, but
you prefer to spend the money on girls/games/drugs/music/... and not
commercial software. ;-)
But maybe with a rewrite the software gets useful. I haven't
yet got an idea what that site could do for me. I'm no expert
on this, but what would be the advantage over, say, http://del.icio.us/ ?
steve....@gmail.com
Steve Huffman
Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk
> I don't know why you necessarily need threads for doing I/O and
> network bound work.
>
> I tend to do things like that in an event-driven fashion, even in
> C++, where pthreads is just a few letters away.
Multiplexing activity on several sockets (C: select / poll / epoll)
is not provided by portable Common Lisp either.
--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ qrc...@knm.org.pl
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/
Peter Herth
> han...@schlund.de (Hannah Schroeter) writes:
>
>
>>I don't know why you necessarily need threads for doing I/O and
>>network bound work.
>>
>>I tend to do things like that in an event-driven fashion, even in
>>C++, where pthreads is just a few letters away.
>
>
> Multiplexing activity on several sockets (C: select / poll / epoll)
> is not provided by portable Common Lisp either.
>
So what? It isn't like they had to write a software and could not find
any Lisp that made it able to - they *did* write the software and it
obviously was working. So I fail to see any reason to blame the library
or Lisp implementation availability for the rewrite.
Peter
--
Ltk, the easy lisp gui http://www.peter-herth.de/ltk/
Bill Atkins
http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html
http://paulgraham.com/books.html
http://paulgraham.com/lisp.html
jayessay
> Yes, we could *afford* to buy a commercial Lisp, but we didn't want to.
Why not?
Bill Atkins
Zing!
jayessay
> Yes, PG has a very strong dislike of Common Lisp. For instance:
Never said that. Think "relatively speaking".
Tayssir John Gabbour
> http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html
>
> here is a longer post describing why they switched
More discussion at Lemonodor, mentioned stability problems. After
pointing out that Edi Weitz is an "army-of-one producing good Lisp
libraries" (w00t!), one of the Reddit guys said the issues "weren't
particularily Lispy":
"The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never quite get
Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night. There were weird threading
issues that would bring the site to its knees a couple times a day and
required constant monitoring."
Tayssir
Sylvain
> The lack of cross-platform threading and networking must be a huge pain
> when developing a web application.
why? the neat thing about a web application is precisely that you don't
have to care about portability since it runs on your server (your
choice of architecture/os/environment)...
when I read the initial article, I thought, well, they are becoming
successful, investors are bringing in the MBAs/suits, and lisp is not
really high on the list of things said suits read on the fancy glossy
magazines they peruse at their country clubs between two 'high level/big
picture' meetings...
--Sylvain
rsher...@gmail.com
>is not provided by portable Common Lisp either.
<snark>Right, but it's in ANSI Python, so they had to switch.</snark>
John Thingstad
wrote:
People write things like this in C++ which dosn't provide this in a
portable
way either.. If you choose to stick with a commercial vendor they provide
portable access to these facilleties.
Just like GCC is just only one C++ compiler ACL is just one implementation
of
CL.
Not sure what you mean by web applications either.
If you are writing a server side application it only needs to
run on that server. In the cases I have wittten web applications
I have used Java on the client side and Lisp on the server side.
They then communicate using XML-RPC (Thinking of extending to SOAP now
though)
AJAX makes even less requirements on the client side.
Only when writing client/server applications over a non-homogenous network
does this realy become a problem. These are rearly web app's though.
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
Stefan Scholl
please?
ajones
Stefan Scholl wrote:
> By the way: What is Reddit? Can someone explain it in two sentences,
> please?
I think I can do it in one. "Reddit is rating-driven group
bookmarking."
I have always failed to see where the business plan is here. They don't
appear have enough information about the people involved to do any kind
of directed advertising, and any kind of for pay additional service
seems like it will be ignored. They don't even have any kind of tagging
facility to implicitly create an advertising demographic.
I would guess they can try to learn something about what a person
likes/doesn't based on article ratings, but without knowing why an
article is rated the way it is this is also kind of pointless. I rate
down posts that have poor spelling, or lots of ads. Try figuring that
out to advertise to me, it has almost nothing to do with the content of
the site in question.
Unless they can figure out something better fast reddit is headed for
serious problems. Somehow I doubt "rewrite the site in python because I
am too lazy to run a virtual machine[1]" is the solution.
[1] Yes, I know there is more to it than just that. I mention it only
because it is a faster way of solving this issue than rewriting your
entire codebase.
Robert Uhl
>
> But maybe with a rewrite the software gets useful. I haven't yet got
> an idea what that site could do for me. I'm no expert on this, but
> what would be the advantage over, say, http://del.icio.us/ ?
Actually, I've been playing around with it for a few days and it's done
a pretty decent job of pointing out some cool articles I'd not seen
before, hence my blog posts being rather more numerous than is the norm.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
It took people a long time to figure out which machine was doing it, and
even longer to figure out how. But for some reason it didn't take them
any time at all to figure that I'd done it. --Paul Tomblin
Robert Uhl
>
> Not sure what you mean by web applications either. If you are writing
> a server side application it only needs to run on that server.
Well, as the guy pointed out he wanted to develop locally on his Mac and
deploy on their FreeBSD box. Dunno why they weren't using SBCL, but
possibly it lacked some feature they needed or thought they needed.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Aldous Huxley
Robert Uhl
>
> I think I can do it in one. "Reddit is rating-driven group
> bookmarking."
>
> I have always failed to see where the business plan is here. They
> don't appear have enough information about the people involved to do
> any kind of directed advertising, and any kind of for pay additional
> service seems like it will be ignored. They don't even have any kind
> of tagging facility to implicitly create an advertising demographic.
>
> I would guess they can try to learn something about what a person
> likes/doesn't based on article ratings, but without knowing why an
> article is rated the way it is this is also kind of pointless. I rate
> down posts that have poor spelling, or lots of ads. Try figuring that
> out to advertise to me, it has almost nothing to do with the content
> of the site in question.
Netflix seems to do pretty well at recommending films based on
like/don't-like ratings. Granted, theirs aren't boolean, but that might
actually make the math simpler (not certain about that, since I don't
know much at all about that area). Perhaps they plan on serving up paid
links which one might like. This isn't actually a foolish idea--most of
us like finding out cool stuff we're interested in.
For example, if when I visited reddit.com they showed me a few links on
where to get a honest-to-goodness signet ring (not the dopey
engraved-flat-surfaces, but a real carved, mirror-image,
sealing-wax-impressing signet), I'd be a happy man. Google's turned up
a few, but there must be more out there.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
Isn't it amazing how a large number of evil morons can give the appearance
of being a single evil genius? --Mel Rimmer
Christophe Rhodes
> "John Thingstad" <john.th...@chello.no> writes:
>>
>> Not sure what you mean by web applications either. If you are writing
>> a server side application it only needs to run on that server.
>
> Well, as the guy pointed out he wanted to develop locally on his Mac and
> deploy on their FreeBSD box. Dunno why they weren't using SBCL, but
> possibly it lacked some feature they needed or thought they needed.
If they were using TBNL, SBCL's lack of thread support on FreeBSD
would have been something of a showstopper. (Lack of thread support
on OS X, too, for that matter).
Christophe
John Thingstad
wrote:
Since both MAC-OS10 and freeBSD have a BSD kernel why not hack
SBCL to provide threading under freeBSD so that SBCL would support
TBNL on both platforms. This would be a great service to
the Lisp comunity AND solve the problem..
Christophe Rhodes
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 10:15:00 +0100, Christophe Rhodes <cs...@cam.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> If they were using TBNL, SBCL's lack of thread support on FreeBSD
>> would have been something of a showstopper. (Lack of thread support
>> on OS X, too, for that matter).
>
> Since both MAC-OS10 and freeBSD have a BSD kernel why not hack
> SBCL to provide threading under freeBSD so that SBCL would support
> TBNL on both platforms. This would be a great service to
> the Lisp comunity AND solve the problem..
Who, me? Because I have no need of threads on BSD or OS X, and I have
no commercial incentive to develop them either.
If you meant the developers of reddit instead, why on earth would they
do that? They rewrote their site in a language they knew, using a
framework written by one of their close acquaintances, so they now
have personal, close support on one of their core components. It took
them two weeks.
Would you like to estimate how long it would take you to implement
SBCL threads under OS X and FreeBSD? Supplementary question: estimate
how long it would take the two(?) developers of reddit.com to do it
instead (you might need error bars on this estimate). Using this
answer, consider just how insane the reddit developers would have had
to be to go down your suggested route.
Christophe
Ulrich Hobelmann
> Since both MAC-OS10 and freeBSD have a BSD kernel why not hack
> SBCL to provide threading under freeBSD so that SBCL would support
> TBNL on both platforms. This would be a great service to
> the Lisp comunity AND solve the problem..
Basically SBCL should work with pthreads, and those are quite portable.
Maybe one or two months ago someone in here said that SBCL's threads
need some Linux-specific features (user-space mutexes?). But porting it
to BSD should also port it to Mac OS, true; their features are very similar.
--
Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
Nikodemus Siivola
would indeed be a great service.
If you're willing to pay for the work I suggest you send mail to
sbcl-devel (or individual developers) and ask for a quote. I'm
personally unavailable for such work till sometime in 2006 due to prior
commitments, but that's just me.
If you're not willing to pay for the work, then doing it yourself is a
strategy that will not only win you undying glory, but also be a deeply
educational experience taking --say-- 1-3 months of your time (assuming
fulltime work, basic SBCL-internals knowledge, a good understanding of
the operating system in question, and a good knowledge of Lisp, C and
assembler for the architecture you're targeting).
If you don't have the time or the chops, and aren't willing to pay for
the work...
Well, what is Usenet for? ;-)
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus Siivola
John Thingstad
wrote:
How about a matter of days.. It is just a matter of doing it!
I recognize that I don't have much clout in the Lisp community
but I will try to redeem that.
You would do that the way I would solve any problem by gathering
the best men around you and being the best man you can be.
Not by expecting a miracle approach from another source to do
work for you!
John Thingstad
If you are willing to come with any technical comments I am ready to
listen.
Personally I have never worked on a MAC or a free-BSD machine before.
I am however one of the early core programmers of Linux and I have
worked with windows and DOS just about as long as it has been around.
I find the implication that I should pay for free software in which
I get no benefit insulting! I would gladly (and have in the past)
contribute to a free software community.
Nikodemus Siivola
"should" do, so no need to feel insulted.
I assumed that you _wanted_ to get SBCL threads ported to OS X and/or
FreeBSD, and suggested two _productive_ ways to go about realizing that
desire. The third option of hanging on the Usenet and waiting for stuff
to fall out of the woodwork is valid too -- just not terribly
effective.
Now it seems that you don't even want to have the threads ported -- or
that at least you would not get any "benefit" from it. That's fine too.
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus Siivola
PS. Given your assertion of "a matter days" to do the port (in reply to
Christophe) I would dearly love to see you do that.
Here's a vager: deliver to me the sources to SBCL with native threads
on FreeBSD (4) _or_ OS X (Panther) before the 7th of January 2006, and
I will pay you pay you 600EUR in return.
In case of dispute a knowledgeable third party can decide if the port
qualifies as functional (buglessness not required, passing the SBCL
regression suite required, usability for development of threaded
applications reuqired, workingness on other platforms required -- no
breaking threads on Linux, essential mergeworthiness to SBCL mainline
required).
If you feel tempted but require a bit more enticement or slightly more
time then perhaps we can negotiate something -- or perhaps others are
willing to chip in. If someone else then John feels tempted by this, by
all means have a go: in that case the bounty will go to the first
mergeworthy candidate to appear before the deadline (7th of January
2006).
If you need pen-and-paper confirmation about this promise, entering it
into a bounty-system, etc, just stipulate your conditions.
Since I don't follow comp.lang.lisp actively anymore any contacts about
this bounty are best sent directly to me: niko...@random-state.net.
Yours,
-- NS
William Bland
>
> Here's a vager: deliver to me the sources to SBCL with native threads
> on FreeBSD (4) _or_ OS X (Panther) before the 7th of January 2006, and
> I will pay you pay you 600EUR in return.
>
>
> If you feel tempted but require a bit more enticement or slightly more
> time then perhaps we can negotiate something -- or perhaps others are
> willing to chip in.
I'd be happy to chip-in. Let's say an additional US $300 from me if the
conditions given in Nikodemus's email are satisfied.
Hmm... perhaps, in addition to the CL-Janitors project being discussed in
another thread, we need a CL-Bounties project to keep track of work
that people are willing to pay for?
Cheers,
Bill.
John Thingstad
>
> If you are willing to come with any technical comments I am ready to
> listen.
> Personally I have never worked on a MAC or a free-BSD machine before.
> I am however one of the early core programmers of Linux and I have
> worked with windows and DOS just about as long as it has been around.
> I find the implication that I should pay for free software in which
> I get no benefit insulting! I would gladly (and have in the past)
> contribute to a free software community.
>
I'll stand by my original word..
And add, why not, 200$ to the originator of a SBCL version
on MAC-OS10 and freeBSD that supports threads.
Go for it! :)
Peter Seibel
I'll be happy to keep track of that too though I declaim any legal
responsibility for resolving disputes over payment, etc. So I'll note
that we have 600EUR from Nikodemus + 300USD from William Bland for a
mergeworthy FreeBSD(4) or OS X (Panther) multithreaded version of SBCL
delivered to Nikodemus by 7 January 2006.
-Peter
P.S. I've got a baker's dozen of volunteers for the cl-janitors
project but only one suggestion for a way to put them to work. I've
begun making a mental list of ideas of my own which I'll try to
externalize in some form when I have a bit of free time but in the
meantime, if folks have ideas for small to medium size projects that
would make the Lisp world a better place, send 'em my way.
--
Peter Seibel * pe...@gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Peter Seibel
> On
>>
>> If you are willing to come with any technical comments I am ready to
>> listen.
>> Personally I have never worked on a MAC or a free-BSD machine before.
>> I am however one of the early core programmers of Linux and I have
>> worked with windows and DOS just about as long as it has been around.
>> I find the implication that I should pay for free software in which
>> I get no benefit insulting! I would gladly (and have in the past)
>> contribute to a free software community.
>>
>
> I'll stand by my original word..
> And add, why not, 200$ to the originator of a SBCL version
> on MAC-OS10 and freeBSD that supports threads.
> Go for it! :)
So, Nikodemus's original bounty was for *either* OS X or FreeBSD. Do
you want to add your $200 pledge to that or do you want to add a $200
sweetener to someone who goes the extra mile and does both platforms?
Also, do you have the same deadline as Nikodemus (7 January 2006) or
is yours an open ended offer?
-Peter
John Thingstad
wrote:
> "John Thingstad" <john.th...@chello.no> writes:
>
>> On
>>>
>>> If you are willing to come with any technical comments I am ready to
>>> listen.
>>> Personally I have never worked on a MAC or a free-BSD machine before.
>>> I am however one of the early core programmers of Linux and I have
>>> worked with windows and DOS just about as long as it has been around.
>>> I find the implication that I should pay for free software in which
>>> I get no benefit insulting! I would gladly (and have in the past)
>>> contribute to a free software community.
>>>
>>
>> I'll stand by my original word..
>> And add, why not, 200$ to the originator of a SBCL version
>> on MAC-OS10 and freeBSD that supports threads.
>> Go for it! :)
>
> So, Nikodemus's original bounty was for *either* OS X or FreeBSD. Do
> you want to add your $200 pledge to that or do you want to add a $200
> sweetener to someone who goes the extra mile and does both platforms?
> Also, do you have the same deadline as Nikodemus (7 January 2006) or
> is yours an open ended offer?
>
> -Peter
>
Since you ask! It holds to forever.
Will anyoune else add!
Deadilne.. dead :)
Never promice something you can't keep..
John
Christian Lynbech
would be a solution in portable LISP, even if it is not part of the
standard, right?
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
- pet...@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
Kenny Tilton
> But isn't UFFI a portable library? Implementing it in terms of that
> would be a solution in portable LISP, even if it is not part of the
> standard, right?
No, it covers some features of some Lisps, by feature-izing into
implementation FFIs (because there is no standard FFI). "some features"
because it is limited to only those features supported by all supported
implementations.
kt
John Thingstad
<john.th...@chello.no> wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 13:57:18 +0100, Nikodemus Siivola
> <niko...@random-state.net> wrote:
>
>> Nevermind the difference between Darwin and FreeBSD, you're right, it
>> would indeed be a great service.
>>
:) Ok so I to will chip in.
If my company becomes succesfull another 400$ but two (2) years from
now!
Adam Connor
>http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/night-of-living-python.html
I thought Brian Mastenbrook's comments were interesting:
http://brian.mastenbrook.net/display/2
"So, for those who seek a lesson in all of this: there are plenty of
Common Lisps around which focus on performance. Which is the Common
Lisp for someone who is happy with the performance of Python, but
wants to use the same implementation, with the same features, on
several platforms, and also wants features like threads? I can't in
all honesty recommend CLISP, not least because there's no good way to
develop a web application inside SLIME (lacking serve-event and
threads, your web listener will block the REPL). CLISP also isn't
usable by a good number of people as an extension language, because
only programs distributed under GPL-compatible licenses can link to
it."
--
adamnospamaustin.rr.com
s/nospam/c\./
Edi Weitz
> I thought Brian Mastenbrook's comments were interesting:
> http://brian.mastenbrook.net/display/2
Yeah. I think the most important point is that this thing is a
tempest in a teacup. They (Reddit) had very specific requirements and
they weren't willing to do anything about it (like buying a commercial
Lisp, buying a development machine which runs FreeBSD, running FreeBSD
inside an emulator, whatever) but they themselves admitted that the
problems they had weren't really Lisp-specific. Case closed... :)
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq "spam...@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Ulrich Hobelmann
> On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:32:00 -0600, Adam Connor <u...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>> I thought Brian Mastenbrook's comments were interesting:
>> http://brian.mastenbrook.net/display/2
>
> Yeah. I think the most important point is that this thing is a
> tempest in a teacup. They (Reddit) had very specific requirements and
> they weren't willing to do anything about it (like buying a commercial
> Lisp, buying a development machine which runs FreeBSD, running FreeBSD
> inside an emulator, whatever) but they themselves admitted that the
> problems they had weren't really Lisp-specific. Case closed... :)
The problems weren't Lisp-specific in a business environment (where you
can simply buy a commercial Lisp), but for hobbyists these are real
problems (there being no free Lisp with those features). Of course in
theory a hobbyist has the time and knowledge to fix them...
Edi Weitz
> The problems weren't Lisp-specific in a business environment (where
> you can simply buy a commercial Lisp), but for hobbyists these are
> real problems (there being no free Lisp with those features). Of
> course in theory a hobbyist has the time and knowledge to fix
> them...
As others have pointed out more than once dedicated hobbyists very
often invest large amounts of money for their hobby - think
photography, cars, musical instruments. Compare the price of a
LispWorks license to that of a Leica M plus lenses for instance.
Adam Connor
wrote:
>On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:32:44 +0100, Ulrich Hobelmann <u.hob...@web.de> wrote:
>
>> The problems weren't Lisp-specific in a business environment (where
>> you can simply buy a commercial Lisp), but for hobbyists these are
>> real problems (there being no free Lisp with those features). Of
>> course in theory a hobbyist has the time and knowledge to fix
>> them...
>
>As others have pointed out more than once dedicated hobbyists very
>often invest large amounts of money for their hobby - think
>photography, cars, musical instruments. Compare the price of a
>LispWorks license to that of a Leica M plus lenses for instance.
Well, that's a huge barrier to entry. I think very, very few people
will invest that kind of money to test drive a scripting language.
Most of them will simply move on if the initial experience isn't good
(in whatever way), unless there is some external driver like jobs.
People put up with the Java mess because it has direct economic
benefits.
You say the problems weren't Lisp-specific because they could have
solved them and stayed in Lisp. I can point out workarounds to most of
Java's problems too, but it doesn't mean they aren't problems.
--
adamnospamaustin.rr.com
s/nospam/c\./
Pascal Costanza
You're switching contexts. Edi was talking about hobbyists. The company
that is being discussed switched to Python, not Java.
Pascal
--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Closer to MOP & ContextL:
http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
Edi Weitz
> Well, that's a huge barrier to entry. I think very, very few people
> will invest that kind of money to test drive a scripting language.
Apart from the fact that CL isn't a scripting language you don't need
one penny to "test drive" it - the commercial vendors all have trial
editions available.
> You say the problems weren't Lisp-specific
No, they said that.
Ulrich Hobelmann
> On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 09:51:18 -0600, Adam Connor <u...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>> Well, that's a huge barrier to entry. I think very, very few people
>> will invest that kind of money to test drive a scripting language.
>
> Apart from the fact that CL isn't a scripting language you don't need
> one penny to "test drive" it - the commercial vendors all have trial
> editions available.
Sure, but the competition (Python, Ruby) is also quite good, and it's
free. Hobbyists CAN try Allegro etc. for free, but they'd rather invest
their learning time into something that they could use for free to build
either something for home, or even a commercial product. It's just part
of human nature, that free is much better than if you'll have to - later
in time - pay a couple 100 bucks.
>> You say the problems weren't Lisp-specific
>
> No, they said that.
Maybe they're not really Lisp problems, but (for whatever reason) they
ARE perceived problems. We can debate if users' perception is wrong,
but that doesn't change the image that Lisp has, out there.
Pascal Costanza
> Edi Weitz wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 09:51:18 -0600, Adam Connor <u...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Well, that's a huge barrier to entry. I think very, very few people
>>> will invest that kind of money to test drive a scripting language.
>>
>> Apart from the fact that CL isn't a scripting language you don't need
>> one penny to "test drive" it - the commercial vendors all have trial
>> editions available.
>
> Sure, but the competition (Python, Ruby) is also quite good, and it's
> free. Hobbyists CAN try Allegro etc. for free, but they'd rather invest
> their learning time into something that they could use for free to build
> either something for home, or even a commercial product. It's just part
> of human nature, that free is much better than if you'll have to - later
> in time - pay a couple 100 bucks.
For hobbyists, Allegro Common Lisp is completely free.
>>> You say the problems weren't Lisp-specific
>>
>> No, they said that.
>
> Maybe they're not really Lisp problems, but (for whatever reason) they
> ARE perceived problems. We can debate if users' perception is wrong,
> but that doesn't change the image that Lisp has, out there.
We can't do anything about wrong perceptions other than try to correct
them. You will definitely not achieve anything by perpetuating wrong
perceptions.
Creighton Hogg
I don't think he was really switching contexts. I think it
was just the point that providing a work around for
inconveniences doesn't make them not inconvenient.
Edi Weitz
> You will definitely not achieve anything by perpetuating wrong
> perceptions.
But if you're not doing anything productive that's the only fun on
Usenet... :)
Edi Weitz
> I think it was just the point that providing a work around for
> inconveniences doesn't make them not inconvenient.
What was the inconvenience and what was the workaround?
Ulrich Hobelmann
> For hobbyists, Allegro Common Lisp is completely free.
That isn't what I meant. Sure, it's free for hobby stuff, but still
there's always the thought that should you ever use it commercially, you
first have to earn the price of Allegro.
You can't just open a commercial web-site and earn maybe €10 in
advertising a month, because that won't be enough.
Now I'm sure you guys have yet another solution for that (and so I am
wrong again), but that doesn't change the perception of people out
there. Yes, I know, neither does talking here. Back to more important
stuff.
Adam Connor
wrote:
>You're switching contexts. Edi was talking about hobbyists. The company
>that is being discussed switched to Python, not Java.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply they switched to Java. I used Java as an
example because I know that community fairly well.
--
adamnospamaustin.rr.com
s/nospam/c\./
Adam Connor
<u.hob...@web.de> wrote:
>Pascal Costanza wrote:
>> For hobbyists, Allegro Common Lisp is completely free.
>
>That isn't what I meant. Sure, it's free for hobby stuff, but still
>there's always the thought that should you ever use it commercially, you
>first have to earn the price of Allegro.
>
>You can't just open a commercial web-site and earn maybe €10 in
>advertising a month, because that won't be enough.
>
>Now I'm sure you guys have yet another solution for that (and so I am
>wrong again), but that doesn't change the perception of people out
>there. Yes, I know, neither does talking here. Back to more important
>stuff.
What it comes down to is that many folks are looking for free (as in
beer, at least) solutions. It might be that once they are sufficiently
invested they would consider commercial alternatives, but it's hard to
get them to even look at a commercial alternative to start out. We can
argue about whether they are being wise or not, I guess, but since
many competing languages are free (both as beer and as speech), it's
hard to make headway by saying "well, you could try this high quality
commercial altenative".
If I want to try Allegro Common Lisp for a small project at a
commercial enterprise, it isn't free. I'm going to go out on a limb
and guess that in most shops, it's easier to try something that's free
(provided the license terms aren't too harsh).
That said, you are probably right that I am overreacting. Lisp's
biggest difficulty in becoming popular is that it doesn't have a
killer app to drag it along, in the way that Netscape helped do for
Java at the start, or Unix did for C, etc.
--
adamnospamaustin.rr.com
s/nospam/c\./
Pascal Costanza
> Pascal Costanza wrote:
>
>> For hobbyists, Allegro Common Lisp is completely free.
>
> That isn't what I meant. Sure, it's free for hobby stuff, but still
> there's always the thought that should you ever use it commercially, you
> first have to earn the price of Allegro.
>
> You can't just open a commercial web-site and earn maybe €10 in
> advertising a month, because that won't be enough.
I don't consider a website that earns 10 Euros per month a commercial
enterprise. What you need is a business plan, and in a business plan you
can also include costs for the infrastructure.
Arthur Lemmens
> On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 17:13:07 +0100, Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> wrote:
>
>> You will definitely not achieve anything by perpetuating wrong
>> perceptions.
>
> But if you're not doing anything productive that's the only fun on
> Usenet... :)
Hey, at least it's on topic. So we're making progress...
bradb
"They had some problems, but nothing that can't be solved by changing
to a commercial distribution?"
So if that is correct, it implies that there are no commercial strength
free Lisps? Why not? Most other languages have commercial strength
free implementations, for many languages the free version is more or
less the defacto standard.
Or am I way off base?
Thanks
Brad
Arthur Lemmens
> Back to more important stuff.
Yeah, like politics...
Edi Weitz
> Would I be wrong to say that the last few posts boil down to "They
> had some problems, but nothing that can't be solved by changing to a
> commercial distribution?"
They had a setup where the OS on the development machine (OS X) was
different from the deployment machine (FreeBSD) and wanted a Lisp that
behaved the same on both and offered certain features like MP. There
are different ways to change this and I'd say a professional way would
have been to use another development machine, but, yes, using for
example AllegroCL would have solved this particular problem. (You'd
still have different operating systems, of course.)
> So if that is correct, it implies that there are no commercial
> strength free Lisps?
No.
> Why not? Most other languages have commercial strength free
> implementations, for many languages the free version is more or less
> the defacto standard.
Most other languages (at least the ones where talking about here) only
have one implementation that's worth talking about.
> Or am I way off base?
Way off. The fact is that there are /very/ good free implementations
for Linux, Unix, and OS X. There are also reasonably good free
implementations for Windows but they are lacking some features people
want (MP, native compilation, whatever). Most whining here comes from
people who insist on using "free software" but want to deploy on
Windows. (Note that the situation was similar for, say, Perl a couple
of years ago.)
If you are a "hobbyist" install Linux on your Intel machine or buy a
Mac and you don't need to pay for an industrial-strength Lisp.
Cheers,
Edi.
Ulrich Hobelmann
Oh sure, politics are important to all of us, because they define to
what degree we're slave to others (for instance). Today's political
systems are all pervasive throughout our lives.
Maybe I should have said urgent stuff, not important stuff. Important
is long-term, but can wait.
Pascal Costanza
You are. You are making generalizations based on one single data point
that not even the guys from the company in question are making.
Another way to describe what they have done is that they have followed
the path of least resistance. This may turn out as an advantage or a
disadvantage, and only time can tell. They have listed their reasons,
and you may agree or not agree with their reasons, but they are not
related to Lisp per se.
The unfortunate thing in this case is that it is a company funded by
Paul Graham who is a very vocal Lisp advocate. In the perception of the
general public, whose attention span tends to be very short, this
translates to something like "Well, if even they switch from Lisp to
something else, then it must be really bad."
However:
- Paul Graham very explicitly stated that he won't interfere with the
decision-making process of the companies he funds.
- The focus on Paul Graham distracts from the fact that there are
numerous companies making good use of Common Lisp - see
http://wiki.alu.org:80/Industry_Application - they just don't look for
the same amount of publicity wrt to the tools they use. It's beyond me
why the reddit case should question the applicability of Common Lisp in
general.
bradb
I personally didn't see the free Lisps as being inferior - I use SBCL
on Linux & it appears to cover what I would want to do.
So basically, it turns out that their platform development just didn't
fit any free lisps and - as was stated earlier - it's all a storm in a
teacup.
Cheers
Brad
Robert Uhl
Completely costless, yes. But I doubt that it's free-as-in-freedom:-)
It's an excellent product, no doubt.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
Jumpin' Jehosophat, you have to explain the error message to them, and
then you have to explain your explanation to them, and then you have to
hit them with a fucking brick, and they still might not shut the fsck
up. --Alan J. Rosenthal
Robert Uhl
>
> So if that is correct, it implies that there are no commercial
> strength free Lisps? Why not? Most other languages have commercial
> strength free implementations, for many languages the free version is
> more or less the defacto standard.
>
> Or am I way off base?
I believe that SBCL is commercial-strength on the Linux platform. But
remember that GCC is not the best C compiler out there, nor is the Linux
kernel the best kernel. They're good enough and free enough that the
cost-benefit analysis work in their favour.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
I don't play with WD40 anymore. I actually managed to light a fish on
fire. while it was underwater -- bash.org/?88551
paulgraham
> I might add... if the folks in a PG-associated startup aren't convinced
> to stick with Lisp, it is going to make other folks wonder why they
> should bother even considering it. So, it's very unfortunate.
I told them it was fine with me if they wanted to rewrite the thing in
Python.
It's not as if the program is some hugely sophisticated collection of
macros and continuations. Most of the complexity in the software is
social, rather than technical. Python is perfectly adequate for it.
Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
threads that kept making the system crash.
Christophe Rhodes
> Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
> threads that kept making the system crash.
There would appear to have been a sum total of zero (0) messages
relating to straws, last or otherwise, on relevant mailing lists. I
mention this merely for information, because I don't have any
particular problem with websites not being written in Lisp.
While I'm at it, though, I would be interested in knowing the
corporate identity behind the "e40" blogger ID in the comments in
<http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html>: is or are the person or
people behind that alias speaking for Franz Inc.? (On the internet,
no-one knows you're a founder of a company...)
Christophe
Thomas F. Burdick
> "paulgraham" <p...@bugbear.com> writes:
>
> > Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
> > threads that kept making the system crash.
>
> There would appear to have been a sum total of zero (0) messages
> relating to straws, last or otherwise, on relevant mailing lists. I
> mention this merely for information, because I don't have any
> particular problem with websites not being written in Lisp.
It sounds to me like they went with one shiny thing, then a new one
passed in front of them, and they went with that. There's nothing
wrong with that, and if they want to write their simple web app in
Python, good for them, the language is certainly up to the task. I do
mind that they posted what sounds like a complete BS post facto
justification. If they'd just said, "we like developing in Python
better" I'd have no problem with it. Inventing technical reasons
without ever having asked *once* is something I do take issue with.
And incidentally, my telepathic debugger says that performance
problems + instability + CMUCL MP = they didn't call
mp::startup-idle-and-toplevel-loops.
> While I'm at it, though, I would be interested in knowing the
> corporate identity behind the "e40" blogger ID in the comments in
> <http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html>: is or are the person or
> people behind that alias speaking for Franz Inc.? (On the internet,
> no-one knows you're a founder of a company...)
I'd be interested to know if this Franz person is a Charlie Hustle
fan.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! |
,--' _,' | Abolish the racist |
/ / | death penalty! |
( -. | `-----------------------'
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Juho Snellman
> "paulgraham" <p...@bugbear.com> writes:
>> Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
>> threads that kept making the system crash.
>
> There would appear to have been a sum total of zero (0) messages
> relating to straws, last or otherwise, on relevant mailing lists.
They did send a message related to this to slime-devel, which might
count as a relevant list.
--
Juho Snellman
Christophe Rhodes
So they did. (They also provide enough information in that message to
disprove Thomas Burdick's telepathic debugging hypothesis).
Christophe
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| And incidentally, my telepathic debugger says that performance
| problems + instability + CMUCL MP = they didn't call
| mp::startup-idle-and-toplevel-loops.
That well could be. That turned out to be an *extemely* important
hint that someone shared here about three years ago, when I was
trying to set up a CMUCL-based web application server. Once I did
that, life became *much* nicer! I'm running several web sites these
days that use CMUCL as a web application server [behind Apache,
in front of PostgreSQL], with web pages being generated dynamically
with HTOUT, and none of them have had any problems with "hanging".
The load on these sites is fairly light, but still, the app server
runs as long as the systems do [which is typicially many months
between scheduled reboots, and years between unscheduled crashes].
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock <rp...@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607
Duncan Rose
> Christophe Rhodes <cs...@cam.ac.uk> writes:
>
--->8--- snipped --->8---
>
> > While I'm at it, though, I would be interested in knowing the
> > corporate identity behind the "e40" blogger ID in the comments in
> > <http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html>: is or are the person or
> > people behind that alias speaking for Franz Inc.? (On the internet,
> > no-one knows you're a founder of a company...)
>
> I'd be interested to know if this Franz person is a Charlie Hustle
> fan.
Not sure why, but I got the overriding impression when reading e40's
comments it was John Foderaro.
-Duncan
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| Adam Connor <u...@nospam.com> wrote:
| > Well, that's a huge barrier to entry. I think very, very few people
| > will invest that kind of money to test drive a scripting language.
|
+---------------
What do you mean?!? I use it for "scripting" all the time! ;-} ;-}
Rob Warnock
| > Would I be wrong to say that the last few posts boil down to "They
| > had some problems, but nothing that can't be solved by changing to a
| > commercial distribution?"
|
| They had a setup where the OS on the development machine (OS X) was
| different from the deployment machine (FreeBSD) and wanted a Lisp that
| behaved the same on both and offered certain features like MP. There
| are different ways to change this and I'd say a professional way would
+---------------
Or a different version of CL, that has MP on both machines!
I do web development using CMUCL on a laptop running FreeBSD
and deploy the apps on a co-lo server running Linux. Works
just fine...
Edi Weitz
> Or a different version of CL, that has MP on both machines!
AFAIK there is no open source Lisp that offers MP on both FreeBSD and
OS X. But even if such a thing existed (or if they had used a
commercial Lisp) I stand by my claim that it's not a good idea to use
different operating systems for development and deployment. There are
just too many surprises waiting around the corner...
Tayssir John Gabbour
>
> While I'm at it, though, I would be interested in knowing the
> corporate identity behind the "e40" blogger ID in the comments in
> <http://reddit.com/blog/2005/12/on-lisp.html>: is or are the person or
> people behind that alias speaking for Franz Inc.? (On the internet,
> no-one knows you're a founder of a company...)
Foderaro made similar comments on a closely related blog.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit#c29
Tayssir
Edi Weitz
> Foderaro made similar comments on a closely related blog.
> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit#c29
There's no evidence that this was the real JKF... :)
Apart from that I don't think the comments are really similar.
Foderaro just talks about "commercial Lisps" while the other poster
explicitely mentions AllegroCL and/or Franz a couple of times.
alex...@gmail.com
e40 made some strange comments, especially regarding cost-based
pricing. Ironically, it was described as a business mistake #1 in one
of the "hottest" reddit articles, followed by the exclusive pursuit of
"premium" markets, as the worst business mistake #2.
Peter Seibel
> On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:14:44 -0600, rp...@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) wrote:
>
>> Or a different version of CL, that has MP on both machines!
>
> AFAIK there is no open source Lisp that offers MP on both FreeBSD
> and OS X. But even if such a thing existed (or if they had used a
> commercial Lisp) I stand by my claim that it's not a good idea to
> use different operating systems for development and deployment.
> There are just too many surprises waiting around the corner...
Hmmm, I'll respectfully disagree--there are advantages for developing
and deploying on heterogeneous platforms beyond the cost savings of
not having to buy developers machines that are similar enough to the
deployment machines to avoid suprises at deployment time. The main one
is that by running your software on lots of different platforms from
the very beginning you smooth out portability problems early. Mostly
I'm thinking of things like developers making assumptions based on the
platform they are developing on that are not warrented based on the
specifications of the language or library they are using. In my
experience sorting these things out earlier, while not free, tends to
lead to more robust software down the line.
Obviously this is easier when you have a language platform that
provides a base level of portability. The single implementation
languages, for better or worse, have gotten people quite use to this
kind of development. But it's possible in other languages at a
slightly higher cost of finding or maintaing the relevant portability
libraries. (That said, if I was developing an app that was going to be
highly dependent on multi-threading I'd probably shell out for Allegro
since they provide threading on all the platforms they
support. (Though I do wish they had native threads on GNU/Linux.)
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel * pe...@gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Edi Weitz
> (That said, if I was developing an app that was going to be highly
> dependent on multi-threading I'd probably shell out for Allegro
> since they provide threading on all the platforms they
> support. (Though I do wish they had native threads on GNU/Linux.)
If you want to shell out for a Lisp that has native threads on all
supported platforms you better give the money to Scieneer... :)
Or wait for LispWorks 5.0 if you're only interested in native threads
on Windows, Linux, and OS X.
steve....@gmail.com
Edi Weitz wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:14:44 -0600, rp...@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) wrote:
>
> > Or a different version of CL, that has MP on both machines!
>
> AFAIK there is no open source Lisp that offers MP on both FreeBSD and
> OS X. But even if such a thing existed (or if they had used a
> commercial Lisp) I stand by my claim that it's not a good idea to use
> different operating systems for development and deployment. There are
> just too many surprises waiting around the corner...
The setup we actually had for reddit was:
The live server: FreeBSD + CMUCL
Devel server: FreeBSD + CMUCL
My Laptop: Basically a frontend to Lisp on the devel server via SLIME.
We stopped trying to actually run reddit in two different Lisp
implementations very early on.
Cheers,
Steve Huffman
Kevin Layer
> I'd be interested to know if this Franz person is a Charlie Hustle
> fan.
Yes, I am. However, I think he went down hill after his first CD.
The Mailmail was just so sublime.
Kevin Layer
Kevin Layer
> e40 made some strange comments, especially regarding cost-based
> pricing. Ironically, it was described as a business mistake #1 in one
> of the "hottest" reddit articles, followed by the exclusive pursuit of
> "premium" markets, as the worst business mistake #2.
That was me. I can't really parse your comments, though. If you have
a specific question I'll try and answer it.
Kevin
Kevin Layer
> On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 15:22:07 GMT, Peter Seibel <pe...@gigamonkeys.com> wrote:
>
> > (That said, if I was developing an app that was going to be highly
> > dependent on multi-threading I'd probably shell out for Allegro
> > since they provide threading on all the platforms they
> > support. (Though I do wish they had native threads on GNU/Linux.)
>
> If you want to shell out for a Lisp that has native threads on all
> supported platforms you better give the money to Scieneer... :)
I find that some people that say they need "native thread" actually
want a full SMP lisp. Scieneer is the only full SMP lisp I know of.
Most people that say they want "native threading" are perfectly happy
with Allegro's non-native thread on *nix. (Our Windows version uses
the native WIN32 API.)
And, yet another group of people actually need native threading, for
one reason or another, usually due to some other system they want to
load into Allegro and have foreign threads interact with Lisp.
Kevin
alex...@gmail.com
There was an article on reddit.com (it was at the top, when I looked at
it) that listed the biggest business mistakes with explanations,
historical examples, etc.
Cost-based pricing (as opposed to price-based costing) was #1.
Basically, customers don't care how much it cost you to produce the
product. E40 was talking about basing the price of ACL on its cost.
Unfortunately, I can't find the article easily. But if you do, my
comments will start to make sense.
Tayssir John Gabbour
> Christophe Rhodes <cs...@cam.ac.uk> writes:
> > "paulgraham" <p...@bugbear.com> writes:
> >
> > > Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
> > > threads that kept making the system crash.
> >
> > There would appear to have been a sum total of zero (0) messages
> > relating to straws, last or otherwise, on relevant mailing lists. I
> > mention this merely for information, because I don't have any
> > particular problem with websites not being written in Lisp.
>
> It sounds to me like they went with one shiny thing, then a new one
> passed in front of them, and they went with that. There's nothing
> wrong with that, and if they want to write their simple web app in
> Python, good for them, the language is certainly up to the task. I do
> mind that they posted what sounds like a complete BS post facto
> justification. If they'd just said, "we like developing in Python
> better" I'd have no problem with it. Inventing technical reasons
> without ever having asked *once* is something I do take issue with.
>
> And incidentally, my telepathic debugger says that performance
> problems + instability + CMUCL MP = they didn't call
> mp::startup-idle-and-toplevel-loops.
I hope your telepathic debugger isn't working, as a Reddit employee was
advised to call it.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4c76befa591a0cbe?utoken=Ef-pHy4AAADo_-Y4PX8oSFGYzo3QNhQbIpy2bASO-G7D1yYMjJwe7JDGqmx8KpdEyGUi4lYF4Fs
(Stumbled across it when considering whether to add
mp::startup-idle-and-top-level-loops to the LispGotchas page.)
Tayssir
Adam Connor
>Unfortunately, I can't find the article easily. But if you do, my
>comments will start to make sense.
I'm guessing you mean "The Five Deadly Business Sins", at
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113208353287697881.html?mod=2_1194_1
--
adamnospamaustin.rr.com
s/nospam/c\./
Friedrich Dominicus
> Edi Weitz <spam...@agharta.de> writes:
>
>> On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:14:44 -0600, rp...@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) wrote:
>>
>>> Or a different version of CL, that has MP on both machines!
>>
>> AFAIK there is no open source Lisp that offers MP on both FreeBSD
>> and OS X. But even if such a thing existed (or if they had used a
>> commercial Lisp) I stand by my claim that it's not a good idea to
>> use different operating systems for development and deployment.
>> There are just too many surprises waiting around the corner...
>
> Hmmm, I'll respectfully disagree--there are advantages for developing
> and deploying on heterogeneous platforms beyond the cost savings of
> not having to buy developers machines that are similar enough to the
> deployment machines to avoid suprises at deployment time.
I think you're wrong with that and I think Edi has more points ;-)
>The main one
> is that by running your software on lots of different platforms from
> the very beginning you smooth out portability problems early. Mostly
> I'm thinking of things like developers making assumptions based on the
> platform they are developing on that are not warrented based on the
> specifications of the language or library they are using. In my
> experience sorting these things out earlier, while not free, tends to
> lead to more robust software down the line.
Well that might be but if you are not forced by the outside, why
should you care? It's better to spend the time on the platform you
know and write "good" software. I can not see any evidennce that
Portability was a requirement.
Regards
Friedrich
--
Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail.
Peter Mechlenborg
> Unfortunately, I can't find the article easily. But if you do, my
> comments will start to make sense.
>
Was it this one:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113208353287697881.html?mod=2_1194_1
Kind regards,
-- Peter
Thomas Lindgren
alex...@gmail.com writes:
> Cost-based pricing (as opposed to price-based costing) was #1.
> Basically, customers don't care how much it cost you to produce the
> product. E40 was talking about basing the price of ACL on its cost.
Yes. Basically, the money spent in building ACL is a sunk cost, which
has nothing really to do with product pricing (except that you may
realize that you have been foolish and should have spent your time and
money on other things).
However, principled reasoning about pricing often falls back on cost;
it's often one of the few concrete numbers available, and it's
normally better than just making up a price. It's still something of a
trap: the end result may well turn out to be disappointing anyway. (By
setting either a too high or too low price.)
Good WSJ article, by the way; it's by Drucker (RIP) of course.
Best,
Thomas
--
Thomas Lindgren
"It's becoming popular? It must be in decline." -- Isaiah Berlin
Christophe Rhodes
> Edi Weitz <spam...@agharta.de> writes:
>> If you want to shell out for a Lisp that has native threads on all
>> supported platforms you better give the money to Scieneer... :)
>
> I find that some people that say they need "native thread" actually
> want a full SMP lisp. Scieneer is the only full SMP lisp I know of.
What do you mean by "full SMP"? If you mean what I think you mean,
which is that lisp threads can run on multiple CPUs (or multiple
cores) simultaneously and quasi-independently, while retaining overall
memory coherence, then I believe that ABCL, OpenMCL and SBCL are all
"full SMP" on at least some of their supported platforms. (If that's
not what you mean, please say so).
Christophe
jayessay
> alex...@gmail.com writes:
>
> > Cost-based pricing (as opposed to price-based costing) was #1.
> > Basically, customers don't care how much it cost you to produce the
> > product. E40 was talking about basing the price of ACL on its cost.
>
> Yes. Basically, the money spent in building ACL is a sunk cost, which
> has nothing really to do with product pricing (except that you may
> realize that you have been foolish and should have spent your time and
> money on other things).
I'm relatively certain that Franz has been in business for some 18
years or so. I don't know if either of you two or others making
similar comments have ever been in business, but if you have, you know
that maintaining a viable business over that much time (especially in
the software biz) means Franz has obviously been doing something
right.
> However, principled reasoning about pricing often falls back on cost;
One thing is for certain: if you don't account for cost, you
absolutely will fail.
/Jon
--
'j' - a n t h o n y at romeo/charley/november com
Peter Seibel
> Peter Seibel <pe...@gigamonkeys.com> writes:
>
>>The main one is that by running your software on lots of different
>>platforms from the very beginning you smooth out portability
>>problems early. Mostly I'm thinking of things like developers making
>>assumptions based on the platform they are developing on that are
>>not warrented based on the specifications of the language or library
>>they are using. In my experience sorting these things out earlier,
>>while not free, tends to lead to more robust software down the line.
> Well that might be but if you are not forced by the outside, why
> should you care? It's better to spend the time on the platform you
> know and write "good" software. I can not see any evidennce that
> Portability was a requirement.
It's true that if you absolutely know what platform you're going to
support, any work you do to support other platforms is wasted
effort. However, in my experience you rarely know that 100% when you
start. And by just having a bit of heterogeneity in development
platforms you are forced to deal with platform differences a little
bit at a time at relatively low cost; when you figure out what
platform you really need to support it turns out to be easier and your
software is more robust than it would have been if you developed for
only a single platform.
This is *especially* true when writing multithreaded code--different
OS's and even diffenent language implementations or VMs can have
different enough threading mechanisms to expose different concurrency
bugs. If you only run on one platform bugs can lie dormant for longer;
then when circumstances force you to add a new platform these dormant
bugs manifest themselves and you kill yourself trying to track them
down. If you had used a mix from the beginning, these bugs would have
been discovered sooner and the code would be more correct and thus
easier to adapt to new circumstances.
alex...@gmail.com
> I'm relatively certain that Franz has been in business for some 18
> years or so. I don't know if either of you two or others making
> similar comments have ever been in business, but if you have, you know
> that maintaining a viable business over that much time (especially in
> the software biz) means Franz has obviously been doing something
> right.
Before we started haunting various Usenet groups, Thomas and I were the
_real_ founders of IBM and Microsoft. We are the guys behind the guys
behind the guys.