Actually, having spent a while writing out and then deleting an
example, I'm not sure why (for CL; I've been doing more elisp of late
and it's more different there).

Are there situations in CL where an anonymous function has clear
benefits over a flet?

Cheers,
M.

Many spell it Lisp; many also spell it lisp.  (Seems to me Schemers and unix
oriented people are more likely to spell it:  lisp.)

It is not fair to say I've been away from the industry; rather that I have
been focused on conventional technologies.

You are very CL-centric!  I am very Scheme centric.

If I had more time, I'd be much more likely to explore ML than CL.

For about the last 10 to 15 years I've seen CL shoved out the door in far
too many companies.  Even think tanks are dumping lisp (I'm spelling it
differntly for you!) in favor of Microsoft technologies.

So, while you want to characterize me as having been away from the industry,
I'd characterize it more as lisp got tossed out of all the industries I live
and move in!

And yet I've still kept up with it as best I could given that it is only not
a bread and butter skill for any companies I've worked for for quite a whie.
It is even a bit risky to mention in the companies I work at (you are likely
to be seen as impractical).

I'm aware of the success stories on the Franz web site.  But from where I
sit; even bread and butter AI applications that are deployed 24/7 and making
lots of money are leaving LISP behind in favor of conventional technologies.
Even the most die hard fans say they lost nothing but a little nostalgia.

I hear LISP people complain about Microsoft a lot.  Why?  Because they truly
are ubiquitous!

When people start complaining about LISP like that; that's what I'd call
ubiquitous.

(I don't think of the hardware as being c++ centric like you do but I
suppose in some ways it is.)

Yes, LISP is on a lot of platforms:  that's not my metric for marketing
success!

When you open the job section of the paper, how many employers ask for LISP
vs. Microsoft solutions?

I could be more specific here, but I'm afraid to drop company names
around!!!  Believe me from the inside, and what I have knowledge of, the
situation is absolutely horrible for LISP.  I mean really serious!  I mean
that as much as I love LISP, Scheme, and many other things like that; using
the professionally is to commit professional suicide.

In fact, it's like this:  an honest philosophy professor will ask students
on the first day:  "How many people are planning on being Philosophy
majors?...Please stay after class, I want to talk some sense into you.".

If I was a professor, I'd use Scheme as the lingua franca but I would warn
students about LISP as a career choice.  Based on what I've witnessed in the
industry, I would feel morally obligated to do so and make a clear
distinction between fun and good career choices.

I would not try to poison anyone; just tell it like it is.

I spent a lot of time testing it, and experimenting with it.  If I had more
time, I'd work more with it and create more code examples to show
applications of it.

I've also got oodles of articles written that I haven't had time to follow
through on publishing yet.  Including an article on deriving the X
combinator.

I'm also working on a series of articles on using LISP concepts in
Javascript and I intend to show examples in both Scheme and Javascript.  If
I had the time I'd like to write a book on this topic.

In addition I'm working on a Scheme implementation in Javascript coded in a
purely object oriented fashion.

I'm also very interested in HTCs:  these are HTML components.  Essentially,
COM components written in script.  I think these are an important technology
that are going to become very important in the future (hopefully serving as
a bridge to LISP).  You can put first class functions into HTC attributes!
I've done it in Javascript.  I'd like to be able to do it using Scheme as a
scripting language one day!

I'm currently working on an HTC project that is important to what I do
professionally but also has ramifications for my general interests in that
direction.

If I had more time I'd like to create a hook into the Scripting Host so that
I could plug a scripting engine into Internet Explorer.  Rice wants someone
to do this work and they want to call the project MzScript but they rely on
volunteers (like many other LISP projects do).  The trouble is if you work
full time, it's enormously hard to find time for such things and still
sleep.  The scripting host interface is not well documented, and with the
advent of .Net the entire game has been changed with the rug having been
pulled out from the way the game was played in the past.

Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft will be funding the Rice PLT; so
hopefully things will get better.  I have the time to beta test but not the
time to do the necessary development:  it's a big job.

I'm reading through Structure and Interpretation for a 2nd time with an eye
to coding some of the examples in Javascript (along with some favorite LISP
examples from the past).

I'm also going through the book (cover to cover):  "LISP In Small Pieces"
and I would like to code all the interpreters and compilers in both Scheme
and Javascript to show that Javascript truly is LISP with C syntax.

I also have function/fractal plotting code in LISP that I want to move over
to Javascript and DHTML.  I might have to write my own graphics module for
this using custom line drawing code.

I also have an ML book that I want to go through; in particular the Lambda
Calculus interpreter.

(There are many other books I'd like to read on everything from lattices, to
denotational semantics.)

I also have been doing work on a lambda calculus interpreter, wanting to
convert it to a myriad of different formats:  XML, Javascript, etc..

I also am looking into XSLT and doing LISPy things with XML and XSLT.

:)

--

(flet ((need-a-name-for-this (x)
         ...))
  (map-x #'need-a-name-for-this ...))

When you can say

  (map-x #'(lambda (x) ...) ...)

Your reflex reaction to tfb's quote blinded you to its import, viz, that
you are fixated so badly on the moment that you cannot see the trend I
keep pointing out: the "herd" is voting with their hooves against the
Fortran branch of evolution and for the Lisp branch, by jumping all over
Python, Ruby, Perl, and now thx to you I will add JavaScript (well, I
don't actually know if the herd digs that, but at least its designers
seem to have discovered Lisp).

What you propose is excellent. Keep at the JS community in re becoming
Lispier and Lispier.

Others will stay behind to hold the fort. Think of Lisp as a reference
implementation of the perfect, practical language: compiled/fast,
standardized, mature, macros, interactive, GCed, GFs, special variables,
dynamic, auto-indenting, sexprs, yada yada....

Others should help Python move towards Lisp (I wager Norvig will do a
bit of that). Grahama, with Arc, draws the moths towards CL with the
light of Arc. Come to think of it, we have the herd surrounded, don't
we? Just a matter of time, because there is no turning back from good ideas.

:)

--

(BTW, there's a "k" at the end of my name.)

I wish you had attended my talk because I covered a lot of stuff.

Many on this list are reacting to me as if I'm a traitor to LISP!

If they had only heard my talk!  I am even more optimistic about LISP than
you are!

I think Microsoft has the coattails to make LISP win and win big; and so I'm
optimistic that Microsoft is LISP's greatest hope of becoming widespread.

The market could change; but as things sit now and into the foreseeable
future that's what it looks like to me.

On the client side Javascript on Internet Explorer gives companies
everything they need to write very nice GUI applications on corporate
intranets (where security isn't as big an issue because you're sitting
behind a *huge* firewall).  Internet Explorer even has a nice debugger for
Javascript.

Javascript is so close to LISP it's more than enough to make me a very happy
camper.

On the server side, the situation is even rosier for LISP via Microsoft.
(On a server, you can do anything you want!)

.Net is not language centric:  everything compiles to CLR and there is a
common type system.  The common type system means you can catch exceptions
from a module written in a diffent language, and you can extend it (etc.).

In .Net, you can use Scheme (it has a CLR compiler, created by Northwestern
University).  And ML, Haskell, and a lot of other languages are supported
(by 3rd party vendors).

.Net also features the best garbage collector ever created (according to the
person in charge of that department at Microsoft and I have no reason to
doubt him).  LISP gurus were called in to help craft it (sorry, but I won't
dare drop any names here as I don't think it would be a good idea to do so!)

So, it would appear that everything is in place for LISP to be very healthy
because of Microsoft.

I've been condescended to pretty intensely on this list as if I'm not
current on LISP.

That's not entirely the case:  I'm just current on different things.  I'm
not as interested in what LISP vendors are up to (I do keep tabs on them
however!) because I don't think that's ultimately going to be the hope of
LISP.

You are saying smaller players have less money and are using CL because it
gives them some efficiency advantages that they couldn't get from
conventional tools.

Thus, the philosophy of the ubiquitous I espouse may good for a programmer,
but not so good for some small companies (which get hurt by this strategy).

Here is my reply:

That is why I suggest LISP vendors make CL work under .NET as a CLR
language!

for item in vec[:].sort():

in Python.

new_vec = vec[:].sort()
for item in new_vec:

Similarly, instead of writing:

(mapcar #'(lambda (x) (frob a x)) vec)

or

(mapcar (curry #'frob a) vec)

I have to write:

(flet ((some-silly-name (x) (frob a x)))
  (mapcar #'some-silly-name vec))

And Python doesn't even give you FLET (afaik, feel free to correct me.
Note that nested DEFs are not the same).

Of course, it does seem that Python is trying as hard as possible not to
be accorded the status of functional language.  I say, let them have
what they want.  Python is not a functional language, for all intents
and purposes, anyway.

The purpose of conferences is to present ideas as food for thought.  Take it
as that.  Take it or leave it.

As to who is ultimately to benefit:  it would be the world at large first
and foremost (a world drowning in needless complexity) and the LISP
community secondarily.  A win for LISP would be a tide that floats all
boats.

My only benefit would be less frustration as the tools get better.

I don't know if I would get much more out of it other than that and some
personal satisfaction.

I have no problems with salesmanship and wish the LISP community didn't
either!!!  =:0)

I.e. I don't do this:

function foo(x) ...

rather this:

var foo;
foo = function(x)...

That means all my functions are anonymous and they show that way on the
stack.

So, I name them like this:

foo.name = "this is my name";

if I want them to show in stack traces.

I find I need anonymous functions all over the place:  once you start
thinking in terms of closures you use them like crazy and don't want to have
to name them.

Closures are rock solid in IE6 Javascript with no caveats of any sort.  They
are every bit as solid and natural as in Scheme.

I feel frustrated that LISP vendors don't want to target wider audiences by
targeting platforms like Microsoft and dovetailing with them.

For instance, .Net isn't language centric; how about targeting .Net with CL?

How about adding extensions to Scheme to make it of interest to real world
applications?

It seems LISP vendors are going after LISP programmers as a market:  that's
not a big enough market.

When you see the herd is going Microsoft, target Microsoft technologies:
dovetail CL with COM!

The other approach:  getting the most LISP you can out of what's out there
is a different issue.  That's more a stop gap than an ultimate solution.
That's more a place to insert a virus into to get the most bang for the
buck.  That's more a note of optimism that the conventional world is slowly
migrating towards LISP and could be helped along in that direction.

But I still think the LISP side could do so much more with very little
effort and just a little more marketing smarts.  Marketing doesn't need to
be as hard as rocket science!

That's what I'm hoping; but I don't want to be presumptive and assume it
will happen without some effort!

  Note The Date object interoperates with the .NET Framework
  System.DateTime data type within JScript .NET. However, other Common
  Language Specification (CLS) languages cannot use the Date object
  because only JScript .NET provides the object; it is not derived from
  a .NET Framework type. Consequently, when type-annotating the
  parameters and return types of CLS-compliant methods, make sure to use
  the System.DateTime data type instead of the Date object. However, you
  may use the Date object to type annotate identifiers other than the
  parameters or return types. For more information, see Writing
  CLS-Compliant Code.

Date is Javascripts built-in type, which you can't really use.  This
goes for many more types, even from C#.

.NET actually is very language centric: all languages are dumebed down
until they fit into CLR.  If the language has more features, it
becomes unusable by other CLR languages.

I actually laughed when reading a book on C# when the author described
the revolutionary way to have primitive types behave like objects --
the concept is called boxing/unboxing.

And, by the way, which "LISP" is it that you are current with?

--
Janis Dzerins

  I think I am a better judge of that than you are.  That you now wish to
  fight the author over having understood something where your reply has
  given the author ample evidence that you did not, does not bode well.

| Your first point I thought was incomprehensible; and apparently you
| didn't wish to elaborate on it.

  You said it yourself: Usenet and email can be time sinks.  You appear
  much too hasty and unwilling to listen for my taste.

| Ultimately however, I go by my logic and what my logic tells me.

  I believe you think you do, but you also think you understood my second
  point quite well, which you did not.

| In fact, I'm getting beaten up on this list lately because of my maverick
| positions within the LISP community!

  Um, this is also wrong.

| So don't lecture me about being different!  In fact I dare say the reason
| for your tone with me is precisely because I am so different from others
| in the LISP community and I don't tow any of the LISP community's party
| lines!!!

  If you ultimately go by your logic, what do you use penultimately?

| My comments on this thread are born of my analysis of marketing issues;
| it is marketing issues that the LISP community is worst at, IMO.

  Yes, we are, and that make just about any looney tune better than what we
  have today.  Which is why, sadly, those who think they risk nothing come
  to Lisp to risk it.

| Your comment above about "programming language issues" is revealing.

  Perhaps you are unaware of how emotional you appear to me, but let me
  tell you this: You are /not/ a man of logic.  Your emotions do cloud your
  reasoning and you only see yourself above the clouds while we mere mortals
  see you behind the clouds, and you probably do not see us very well, but
  think you do, such as in your first line to me.  In this case, you imagine
  your clear purpose is to judge other people, not reason with them.  Let
  me just say that I do not appreciate being judged by people who do not
  take the time to undersand what I am talking about.

| The issues LISP faces aren't programming language issues at this
| juncture.  They are marketing and survival issues!  That is what I think
| you need to get clear on.

  It never was unclear before you even started your talk.  (I was unable to
  attend this conference for health reasons, so this is only to establish a
  timeline.)

| I'm tired of seeing employers dump LISP (and they are dumping it very
| fast, those that still have any LISP code left).  LISP is *extremely*
| marginalized; and I don't like being marginalized.

  This goes directly to my stating that you fear being different.  Your
  frantic shrieking about "stand out" and "prima dona" are not contradicted.

| I believe what you mean by that comment is you think my posture of
| wanting to get on board with conventional technologies and work with them
| (rather than working against them) is letting somebody else "take" (sic)
| all my important decisions.

  Thank you for pointing out the misuse of "take" over "make", a remnant of
  my native tongue which I now cannot imagine how slipped in there.  But if
  you had been a man of reason and sound purpose, you would simply have
  written "make" to correct it without making a point of it.  You chose to
  make a point of it.  That alone is revealing of so many things about you.
  (Since you are into "revealing" things.)

| Assuming that's what you mean; I disagree completely with your assessment
| of what I'm doing: I don't feel I'm abdicating and letting someone else
| make my decisions.

  Of course you do not /feel/ that way, but what was this about ultimately
  going by logic?  You want on the bandwagon/juggernaut and you do not want
  to be marginalized.  That is, ipso facto, letting others make your most
  important decisions.

| When I look out on the world, I only see this world; not some world I'd
| prefer it to be.  Given that; I choose to live in this world, the way it
| is, as best I can.  It's all about strategy.

  The speech quoted by Thomas Burdick appears to apply in abundance.

| This harkens back to age old debates about what it means to compromise
| versus selling out; I covered these issues very deeply and thoroughly in
| my paper.

  I may eventually read it.

| Frankly, after my experience of writing and presenting my paper; then
| listening to the feedback, I'm not as optimistic for the LISP community
| as I am for the conventional world.

  Of course you are not.  I could have told you that before you started.

| I'm at the point now where I think it's time to give up on trying to make
| LISP the language win; and it's time instead to start dismantling LISP
| and packaging up the pieces to export out into the conventional world.
| LISP In Small Pieces, indeed!  (Awesome book, BTW.)

  This is the foretold conclusion.

| In other words, the concepts of LISP can be applied to the conventional
| world and live on in the genes of other technologies; but I'm much less
| optimistic about LISP the language ever winning in its current form.

  As long as you contrast "win" with "lose", you have already lost.  There
  is only one winner of the mass market in software, and it is Microsoft.

| The reason why is because the LISP community truly seems to have
| absolutely no interest in winning in the market place and seems quite
| content to remain marginalized (something I cannot personally live with).

  Would second best be to your satisfaction or would that be marginalized,
  too?  How far down the ranking list do you have to go before you are
  "marginalized" in your estimate?  Or in other words, which is the least
  popular non-marginalized programming language?  I need this only to
  calibrate my judgment of your accuracy of judgment.  I fear that you may
  lack this quality entirely and only go by your fealings.  (That you seem
  to think this is /wrong/, is all the more reason to suspect that you do,
  and this self-flattering nonsense about ultimately going by logic is a
  very loud alarm signal to people who know much more psychology than you
  evidently do.)

| I now realize I have very different goals from anyone else I've met in
| the LISP community.

  You have only talked and listened for an affirmative nod, not for any of
  the serious objections or reasons of your listeners, nor to what their
  goals might be.  You did not get the nod, thus you assume your /goals/
  are different.  What if your /means/ were unpalatable to those who have
  the same goals?  What if your /goals/ are poorly understood by /you/, not
  by those who listen to you, who understand them much better than you, but
  may also disagree that they are the most important goals?  You have not
  even made an /attempt/ to listen to what the goals of people here are.

  You assume way too much, Andre van Meulebrouck.

| Do I bow down to the LISP community and take on their tastes?  Or should
| I dare to be different and plot my own course???  =:0)

  You are a man of much contradiction and too little seriousness despite
  your very judgmental attitudes.  I feel sorry for you.  Now go jump on
  the bandwagon.  I sincerely hope you do not miss it and get run over.

  If you should change your personality dramatically and start listening to
  individual people, let me know.  We have something to talk about, but as
  long as you want to be the only one talking, my only desire is to make
  you stop talking and defending yourself and /listen/ to other people.
  Remember what I said about fearing to be different?  You consistently
  treat people you talk with as members of some group, not as individuals.
  You make conclusions about the community after talking to /me/.  I am not
  now and never will be the community.  If something I say represents the
  views of any group of people, it is by accident.  I never have paid any
  attention to the views of groups of people except that which they have
  formally agreed to agree on, such as standards and laws.  /Individuals/
  matter to me.  The masses matter to you.  When an individual disagrees
  with me, my one and only goal is mutual understanding before I can agree:
  to understand that individual and have that individual understand me,
  what we agree or disagree with at the end of that process is impossible
  to tell.  When a group of people does not agree with you, you are willing
  to reject it, unless you perceive that group to be the juggernaut of the
  market, in which case you change your mind.  This, to me, is the textbook
  case of one who fears being different and who acts from that fear when he
  feels left out a group.  But you are /not/ outside any group here.  All of
  us here are individuals and there are no sides to take, no group consensus
  that you have to fight as a whole.  People are willing to listen to your
  arguments and some of them may change their views on some small point or
  other, or maybe their general outlook on things if you are good.  This is
  what it means to let others come to you, which you completely failed to
  understand, but do not even understand that you did because you think
  that if it looks like something you could agree with in words, it must be
  something you can agree with in meaning.  It actually very seldom is.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  So this is the chosen level of your communication with other people.

| I still stand 100% by my English.  I am a native speaker of English having
| been born in this country and I have ample background in linguistics.

  Hurrah for you!  (That is what you wanted, now, was it not?)

  However, you do not understand the word "meaningless", yet.  It relates
  to the word "meaning" and not possessing that quality, and is not a
  matter of linguistics, but a matter of conceptual clarity, which you lack.

  Enjoy your talking to other people.  I want to enjoy talking with people.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  It was not your grammar that was corrected, it was the contents.  As in
  the word "meaning", which occurs at several levels, not just grammar.

| I was truly baffled by what the objection was that he was making.  I
| still don't get it.

  But still you think it was the grammar and make stupid comments about
  hypocrisy.  Most people, when they realize that they do not understand
  something, refrain from taking such actions as would render them idiots
  in the views of others, if not themselves.  You obviously do not think
  you have anything to lose, and this is what your behavior tells me that I
  should take to heart about you.  People who have nothing to lose, also
  have very little to give others.  In an exchange between two intelligent
  and thinking people, what matters is what they can give eachother, not
  how little they have to lose by ridiculing the other part for typos and
  minor mistakes.

  But you are not an intelligent and thinking man, Andre van Meulebrouck.
  You may think you ultimately go by logic, but until you get to your
  ultimate tool, you are one heck of an emotional and jugdmental person.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  If you want to address shortcomings of Scheme, the newsgroup is
  comp.lang.scheme and their community also sports conferences.

  "LISP" these days is Common Lisp.

| So, given a Scheme in which I'd have to use closures to roll my own
| object system versus Javascript with its simple built in system; I
| actually do prefer to use Javascript!

  So would many of us Common Lisp programmers.

  BTW, your eager use of the exclamation point makes it very hard to take
  you seriously.  It is hard to imagine a person who makes an exclamation,
  with three exclamation points in some places, willing to listen to any
  argument that could change his mind, as it would tend to give the yeller
  the misconception that people would think he made a fool of himself by
  yelling out something that was false.  Therefore, the more exclamation
  points, the less point there is in trying to talk to the person using them.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  You are so /judgmental/ and not even aware of it.

  Intelligent and thinking people can listen to arguments about something
  they do not personally /like/ and find cause for enjoyment of the line of
  reasoning even if it was used to support a argument they do not approve
  of.  Intelligent people think first and agree or disagree later.  Stupid
  people agree or disagree first and never think.

| Looking past even that aspect of it: I don't view things as "us vs. them"
| quite like you do.

  You are the /worst/ "us vs. them" person I have ever seen posting here.

  You also missed the point of that speech by a mile.

  I have been holding out on this, but you, sir, are an idiot.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

(defun silly-example ()
  (flet ((flet () 'hello))
    #'flet))

  Most people would prefer an anonymous function here.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  People need to be made aware of this fact.

| > I don't know estorery; I assume you mean esoterica.  What esoterica are
| > we pondering?  Specifically?
|
| Typo:  esotery.

  Is there no limit to your arrogance?  Look up the word "esoterica", if
  you even own a dictionary.  Or use www.merriam-webster.com

| Right now Javascript is like ersatz LISP; but it's good enough.  Close
| enough.

  Maybe and even possibly true for Scheme.  By your own admission, you do
  not know Common Lisp, so even you should be able to understand that it is
  not true for Common Lisp.

  Confusing Common Lisp and Scheme is permissible /once/ in a human life.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway