Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> writes on comp.lang.lisp

To put it in simple software terms, in a world of free software,
the overall world-wide incentive for software-making and otherwise creation
of information is in its expected ultimate use-value.
Any additional "incentive" that does correspond to use-value
is a neat loss to society at large (waste of resource for useless ends),
and a corruption of the incented human mind.
Intellectual property does _not_ increase use-value in _any_ way;
it inserts barriers to use, thereby _decreasing_ use-value,
and it indeed creates "incentive" for useless redundancy and immoral plunder.

Certainly there is a use/need of some infrastructure to collect the existing
overall incentive and transform it into actual funding of creators.
The rigid barrier-based structures of intellectual property are a very
poor such infrastructure: IP owners collect the incentive that they manage
to fence in, collecting a heavy tax on those who enter, exit or live
in the fenced territory (again remindful of feudal Europe).
The fluid adaptative structure of a free market is a much
more interesting structure, where no one is entitled right to destruction,
and where any spotted shortcoming that leads to lack of creation
becomes an opportunity to render a service by connecting providers
and consumers of services: that's the reason why Europe has dropped
tax barriers in its internal borders, and why the world constantly
negociates free trade agreements.

Software is not much different from math.
Mathematicians don't sell the _right_ to use theorems,
and publish theorems that can be freely reused, copied, modified, etc.
They sell, by teaching, the _proficiency_ to use theorems;
by researching, the _opportunity_ to use theorems;
by consulting, the _suitability_ of theorems to use; etc.
Certainly, most "mathematical engineers" do petty additions, substractions,
divisions, and multiplications, in smaller or bigger financial businesses;
they do accounting or trading of some sort; just like most computer engineers.
Mathematical|Computer scientists in research labs and universities,
and sell research and consultancy on higher topics.
And a lot of math|computer scientists teach elementary science
and techniques to future technicians.
All in all, no need for any kind of intellectual property here.
[yes, math books are subject to copyright, but they don't prevent
reuse of theorems, that stay valid accross rephrasing; also,
copyrights don't seem to provide any gigantic incentive to research,
and seem mostly to be mostly an annoyance to mathematicians
and a tax levied upon them by publishers].

If by "wealthy", you mean that you demand above-average incomes,
the ability to spend your life in a luxuous setting, or anything such,
then I don't see why you're entitled to it, and why the legal and
paralegal systems should guarantee you anything about it.
Certainly, proprietary software can help some people becoming wealthy
in this way; but only to the detriment of many other people who are
plundered and racketted. Every single cent that makes wealthier
an IP owner as such is two cents lost by people who are not free
to compete or to benefit from competition.

To repeat myself once again:
        Because people confuse information and information-related services
        they are afraid that Free (libre) Information mean free (gratis)
        information-related services, which would indeed kill the industry
        of said services. On the contrary, Free Information would create a
        Free Market in these services, instead of current monopolies,
        which means they will be available at a fair price, so the result
        would be a flourishment of that industry!

Again, you may disagree with the position and arguments
of free software tenants such as me.
But while disagreeing, please do not deform them.
And if you do spot some internal inconsistency in them
then please do tell us about it so we be enlightened.

Best regards,

  it is this distinction that is counter-productive to understand Lisp.

| >Sure - but why is it a pro? Could also be a "Cons".
|
| Grin.  But too many conses slows the processing.
|
| But that doesn't stop it from being a "pro".

  wow!  I think we found the reason for Lisp's problems in gaining wider
  popularity and acceptance.  the first people see when they start to learn
  about Lisp are all the cons!  and how to make Lisp more popular?  simple!
  lists should simply be made up of pro cells.  problem solved.  ;)

| Yes -- nearly the entire book "On Lisp" is about them.  Compare Scheme.

  Scheme people see problems in Common Lisp macros because they decided
  against two namespaces, and therefore pollute the function namespace much
  more readily than Common Lisp people do, which means that a macro could
  expand into code that makes a function into a variable in Scheme.  this
  is clearly horrible, so _they_ need hygienic macros.  CL doesn't, because
  the core problem has been fixed.

Now, it is possible to avoid hygiene problems in CL
with a little circumspection when defining the macro,
but it is possible to do exactly the same in Scheme
too.  The same, easily learnt defensive techniques that
Lispers have always used to maintain hygiene work for
Scheme too.  There isn't anything CL vs Scheme about
this issue.  There may be other issues that are indeed
definingly divisive, but this isn't one of them.

I can't bring myself to understand why anyone objects to snapping off the
word "library" when referring to a collection of functions.  Would you
prefer "magazine" or "clip"?

BTW, you probably know this already, but something seems to be messing up
your posts -- they're missing uppercase letters in places, and they're
indentation is kinda messed up.  Add in the occasional run-on sentance and
they become very hard to read, which is a pity for posts of this quality.

The core problem is unintentional variable capture.

If we were to just go ahead and call any collection of functions a
library, I'd contend that ANSI CL consists of 7 libraries (or any
number of libraries for that matter).  Now I leave it to you to find
out which symbol belongs to which library...  Not an easy task.

BTW: If you only put special forms into the core (thereby creating a
rather non-functional core), why do you contend that the syntax of
Lisp is part of the core?  All the nice readtable stuff would be part
of the library, so I'd contend that a large part of Lisp's syntax
would be part of the library.  Doesn't make much sense to me, but hey,
why not?

The problem of unintentional variable capture can be easily
circumvented though, and I utterly fail to see how this is a
_semantic_ problem.  The semantics of unhygienic macros are clear and
clearly understood.  It just so happens that some people don't like
the semantics.

And unhygienic macros give me the power to do intentional variable and
function capture, which gives CL's macro system quite a bit of extra
power.

And the core advantage is intentional symbol capture.  Since you
mention "On Lisp", you should look up all the anaphoric macros in
there, which would be not be possible if CL had only hygienic macros.

Regs, Pierre.

Oh, and if you're going to be pedantic at people you should refrain
from making such elementary errors as writing "they're" when you
mean "their". :-)

  huh?  if one end tries to explain and compare, what other than understand
  should the other end try to do?  I must have missed something.

| I can't bring myself to understand why anyone objects to snapping off the
| word "library" when referring to a collection of functions.  Would you
| prefer "magazine" or "clip"?

  "library" has very specific connotations and annotations in programming
  language, none of which are applicable to Common Lisp.  the whole concept
  is very, very different from what we do in Lisp.  I'd expect "library" to
  be the equivalent of "package" in Common Lisp.  since there is but one
  standard package, which holds the entire language, there _is_ no library.

| Read "On Lisp"; it's a magnificent book.

  I know.  I read it when it came out.

| The core problem is unintentional variable capture.

  well, the problem with hygienic macros is that you can't have intentional
  capture.  however, the problem is so much more severe in Scheme that many
  are actually afraid of macros because of it.  this is not something I say
  because I don't like Scheme.  I don't like Scheme because it has this and
  many other problems that Common Lisp doesn't have, mainly because it did
  retain the two namespaces that Scheme discarded.  I've been bothered by
  the same problem that Scheme has in other languages, too, like C.  it's
  just stupid to have one namespace: a function can be called and variables
  can't and that's a sufficiently fundamental difference that I think two
  namespaces fall out naturally, and I have created the distinction when I
  needed to design my own languages.  nobody seems to think it's a problem.
  except Scheme people.  so I'd say the _severity_ of the macro problem is
  an artifact of the one namespace decision, and that the problem is so
  easy to curtail otherwise that the problem is not perceived as a problem
  that needs solving.

Now, if I charge any amount of money, I'm creating a barrier that
will keep out the frivolous requests, but I think I could do the
same thing by requesting snail mail, or anything moderately
inconvenient.  This may be worth doing:  "Send $20 to this address
for the source code."

On the other hand, suppose I want to do some more filtering.  I want
to exclude people unless they really want it.  In this case, going
by cash value doesn't work.  An amount that will slow down somebody
with a good job is going to be essentially impossible for a grad
student on his or her own.  

Now, if I just want to get paid for what I do, this isn't an issue.
(Well, there are issues.  It costs very little to mail out a CD-ROM,
and a company that charges more than $10 to do so is probably making
money on it.  The company does want to make as much money as possible,
and one ideal form is to charge each person the maximum they'd pay.
Many companies sell to students at a lower rate, since most students
wouldn't pay commercial prices, and the money they send in is therefore
extra profit.  Market-driven pricing is difficult, but it's probably
more profitable in this field than flat-rate.)  It is an issue if I'm
trying to filter as Erik suggests.

  One would hope

Suppose I write a software system.  I can do pretty much anything with
it I like, from declaring it public domain to putting all the sources
and binaries under my bed.  Suppose I decide to distribute binaries.
I can give them away or sell them or whatever.  By the time we're
considering Erik's proposal, we're beyond that.  We're wondering how
to distribute the source (presumably, we aren't distributing source
to people with no right to the binaries).

Erik's position is, if I understand it correctly, that unlimited
distribution of source is a Bad Idea.  It is necessary to distribute
it under some conditions, but it should in general only go to people
who you have some confidence in, for some reason or another.  (For
commercial products, there's always the necessary NDA; for other purposes,
it seems to me that it's just as easy to ignore somebody when they
want to make changes or base their implementation on something they
shouldn't as to ignore them when they ask for the source.)  I'm saying
that asking for large quantities of money is not the way to filter
*how* serious somebody is.  

One example would be Microsoft operating systems.  Many people buy them
because, with all their problems, they look like the best way of
getting the job done.  Most people cannot create their own operating
system that will work even as well as Microsoft's, particularly when
they have to run various applications on it.  Therefore, they pay
Microsoft what Microsoft asks, and put up with whatever Microsoft
does.

Or, consider Erik.  Erik apparently has a very satisfactory relationship
with Franz.  In doing this, Erik has become very accustomed to Allegro
Common Lisp for Windows, and presumably Erik would be seriously
discommoded if, for some reason, he were unable to continue working
with ACL.  If Erik was half-expecting Franz to completely dump its
Lisp development to go into C++, say, he would have reason to be
afraid.

There are two dynamics here.  One is "shrink-wrapped" software, and one
is foreseeable obsolescence.  (I have plenty of fifty-year-old books
around, and they're still useful.  If I had any of the software around
that I had fifteen years ago, it would be useless.)

Just looking at this from a laissez-faire attitude is to miss the problem.
The traditional attitude is "take it or leave it", and that works very
well as long as the buyer has reasonable freedom to leave it.  If the
buyer is likely to be committed, the system is distorted.  The traditional
remedy would be to make deals with the providers, but the providers in
this case really don't care about dealing with me, other than selling
me the stuff.

Nor is this a simple dichotomy between "content creators" and "content
consumers".  The company I work for sells high-quality software to
manage electrical power distribution systems.  We certainly create
content.  In doing so, we consume large amounts of content from various
sources.  We are dependent on HP, Digital, Sun, and Microsoft for the
operating systems we work on.  (Right now, we're looking at doing a
good bit of work in order to adapt to HP-UX 11.)  We are essentially
dependent on the same people for C++ compilers.  We use various Gnu
products.  We use Perl.  (We do not, unfortunately, use Common Lisp,
and I don't have a good chance of changing that real soon.)  We use
all sorts of stuff.

We aren't immune from all of this dependence just because we're content
creators.  Certainly we could write most of the stuff we use in-house.
(My last job was working for a place like that - and that was
nightmarish.)  But we wouldn't do as good a job at much of it, and,
more importantly, we couldn't sell it as well.  (We are in business
to make money, and the biggest single reason I work there is because
they pay me.)

The market economy system works very well where there is a fairly large
and somewhat free market (and when there are no hidden or collective
costs).  This does not mean it works well for all areas of the economy.

If you don't like Microsoft, then you really should think about how much
you want software companies to care about the bottom line.

Remember that most software is bought by people who don't know the
details, and don't want to know.  For very good reasons, they'd much
rather spend time and energy figuring out how to sell more office
supplies, or make flatware with a less expensive process, or whatever
else they are really doing in business.

As long as Microsoft keeps the quality high enough so that most people
can get their job done most of the time, so people don't actually
revolt, they will keep selling lots and lots of software.  If they
raise the quality beyond that, they don't sell much more software.

Yes, software lends itself to "single-sourceness", but it's not
clear whether that's inherent, irrelevant, or merely an accident.

Yet, it the way everything else works.  If I'm a GM dealer and
GM makes me unhappy, "don't use it" is my only alternative.  The
fact that that alternative is incredibly expensive doesn't matter.
(Yes, I can sell other cars, just as you can write other software,
but the transition will be painful.)

What is it about software that makes "don't use it" unacceptable?

-andy

Note that I don't claim to disagree with the actual reason you posted that
-- I understand.  Tunes is really dragging, and Fare would agree with that
statement.

Quotes edited accordingly.

Note that I don't claim to disagree with the actual reason you posted that
-- I understand.  Tunes is really dragging, and Fare would agree with that
statement.  That doesn't mmake the entire project worthless; in fact, even
a single example of an imperfect language review (is that REALLY the worst
you could find??) doesn't change that.

But here it is one more time: Fare is talking about all the available
words in Common Lisp.

"Wordset" would be, I believe, an equally useful term.  "Library",
however, will be immediately understandable to anyone with any other
language background, and was probably the first word which popped to his
mind.

I don't get _how_ that could cause any confusion at all, let alone offence.

I'm exaggerating, of course.  But I sense that attitude, and I like it.

No mistake, I like this NG because of the real weight of what's discussed
here.  But sifting through the chaff is hard, hard, hard -- and posting
anything coherent is asking for an egotistical flame.

Like the one I'm writing now.

I'm not as hypocritical as I seem -- I recognise that I'm less valuble
than many of the posters even in this thread.  But I'm puzzled -- in other
NGs, I _am_ valuble, my postings are light, humorous, and informative, and
the whole NG is more pleasant.

A pity we can't bring Tim Peters of Python fame in here.

Anyhow, pedanticity[:-)] wasn't my intent -- I just wanted to mention
something which was making me uncomfortable.  I won't mention it again, of
course; he's free to continue doing it, and I'm free to get used to it :).

Keep in mind, though, that in a primarily written communication, failing
to meet simple conventions like this sends the same message that going to
work unshaven and with uncombed hair would -- "I don't really care about
you." Perhaps it's the right message to send; it doesn't fit with the care
he puts into his posts, and the contrast is almost painful.

Common Lisp has no library.
You would need to define wording a bit *before* writing a comparison.
Common Lisp incorporates all the functionality that is defined
by the standard - but not by means of a "library".

Well, it varies, some posters are really helpful - some are not.

Even if I think your (partly) defence of the tunes stuff
is wrong - discussing it might be helpful to others. They
have to decide on the arguments and get a better impression
what Common Lisp is really about.

Yup. Which is why I go ahead and use only "defmacro", regardless
of whether I'm coding in Scheme or Common Lisp. All Schemes I've
run into so far (that have macros at all) have some kind of
low-level macro facility, which if it isn't "defmacro" already
can always be used to define it easily enough...

-Rob

  no, I meant what I said and said what I meant.  if I had meant something
  else, I would have said that, instead.  but now that you don't need what
  I say to form an opinion about what I have meant, I'll just stop here.
  you will probably invent the rest of what I had in mind, anyway.

Oh well, never mind.

  I didn't say MORE hackable, I said its hackability.  sigh.  I'm saying
  that MS-DOS would not have become a winner in the market if it had been
  unhackable and people couldn't add fairly basic stuff to it and learn
  more about it -- it's the same argument people make about free software,
  for crying out loud!  if you don't think it mattered for MS-DOS, you
  should explain why the exact same thing is _the_ defining property of the
  success of free software in some people's mind.  initial deployment may
  well have been because of the "IBM" brand, but how many other products
  have had the "IBM" brand and _not_ become widely popular?  the efforts to
  explain the normal life of an IBM product fail utterly when that product
  became a NON-IBM product.

  I have to wonder, am I the only person left on this planet who remembers
  the computer magazines of the '80s?

| Not quite at first, IIRC.  I believe IBM would sell one of three OSes
| with the early PCs:  PC-DOS, CP/M-86, and the p-system.  MS-DOS was
| shipped as PC-DOS and was the default.

  there _was_ no MS-DOS at the start.  PC-DOS was a relabeling of QD-DOS
  (Quick and Dirty DOS) made by one of Bill Gates' early victims, and very
  little else.  it was basically a port of CP/M to the 8086 without the
  stupid incompatibilities that cost Digital Research their market position.

| If you don't like Microsoft, then you really should think about how much
| you want software companies to care about the bottom line.

  your decision to give Microsoft and Bill Gates your full moral support is
  not a necessary consequent of caring about the bottom line.  I suggest
  you think about how caring about ethics and legal business practices is
  not necessarily the detriment to success that it would have been if
  Microsoft had cared about them.

  I also don't think drug czars, pimps, extortionists, and porn makers are
  good models of how to make money, but there's no doubt that in each of
  these categories of "business", the bottom line is very well cared for.

  in case you haven't noticed, Bill Gates is actually defrauding people.
  most people who engage in fraud will make big money for a while -- if
  they had been utter, complete, and immediate failures, there would have
  been no incentive to make laws against fraud.

| >>   the mass market is _not_ the only market.  the only thing we can say for
| >>   sure in this business about those who believe that is that Bill Gates
| >>   profits even more by having as many people disregard every other market.

| And why do they disregard every other market?

  I was talking about people who claim Bill Gates is next to God, not the
  people who buy his crapware, because they _are_ his market.  it's the
  people who argue _against_ creating software for something _other_ than
  the mass-market that Bill Gates controls that I'm interested in.  

| There have always been different operating systems and languages
| available, if you knew what you were doing and what you wanted.  For the
| individual purchaser, gaining the knowledge was generally a bad move.
| The result is that the market is dominated by people who really don't
| know what they're doing, and this is a bad thing in general.
| Unfortunate, but I don't have a fix for it.

  this is a twist on the old "but what can one man do?" argument, and it is
  just as invalid.  each man can do exactly what he wants.  conforming to
  the masses is a _choice_, and any other choice may be made.  the fix is
  therefore very simple: change your own ways, then change that of one more
  guy.  publicize your choice, understand what people base their decisions
  on, then do something that makes a few people notice.  you can't change
  the minds of millions of people at once, you have to change a few minds
  at a time, starting with yourself.  if you deny that that option exists,
  there is no fix for any problem at all, from _your_ perspective, that is.

  why don't you _try_ to understand rather than repeat that you don't?

  you're facing the same problem faced by people who aren't used to how
  racial issues work in the United States.  if you're used to say "black"
  in your environment and some people have a serious reaction to that in
  some other environment because it has a whole truck-load of very wrong
  connotations, _you_ are the fool for not recognizing this and trying to
  respect that the connotations are undesirable and use something else
  without those same connotations, not the person who objects to your usage
  or "terminology".

  viz, "library" has a lot of connotations that are strongly invalid for
  Common Lisp.  listen to that fact.  try to understand the history of that
  fact.  try to figure out why people object to the term along with such
  things as that Common Lisp doesn't "link" with libraries, doesn't produce
  "object files" and doesn't come with a "library manager", doesn't
  "resolve" undefined symbols, etc.

  on the other hand, how we choose to organize Lisp programs in memory and
  on disk is a completely separate problem from the language.  we might
  very well organize the system such that (1) some functions are loaded
  from disk on demand, (2) some functions are in some particular shared
  libraries, (3) some functions are written in a different language and
  actually form a static-language type "library" in the boot-up process.
  none of this, however, has any bearing at all on the way Lisp sees these
  functions.  the concept "library" is therefore _destructive_ in getting
  to the proper way to view a Lisp system, because you will forever focus
  on the wrong part of the system and the way it is organized.

| Seriously, though, I really like how Lisp's age seems to lend it
| perspective on issues like this.  Other languages seem to imagine that
| they have to get threads added NOW; Lisp just kinda goes: okay, let it
| wait one or ten years.

  (what became) Common Lisp has also _had_ threads for about twenty years,
  without the clamor for standardization that we see today.  people have
  been satisfied with the way things have worked in the various Lisps, and
  the desire to standardize the obviously immature hasn't been very vocal
  until fairly recently, _because_ neophytes in language land make a huge
  point of having a very simple version of what most Lisps already support.

| IMO, this NG is one of the worst for getting information I've been on.

  that's because you insist on deciding the form in which you will accept
  it.  other people have been near ecstatic about this newsgroup because
  they are (gently) forced to think about unusual issues and rethink their
  position on others.  you don't seem to appreciate this interaction at
  all, so of course you will not find what you're looking for -- as witness
  your desire to force others to accept that "library" is acceptable here.
  you will fail, because it is not the right concept.  your insistence is
  creating a lot of unnecessary friction.  other people who insist on
  bringing a lot of friction to the newsgroup for basically the same
  reason: they don't want to learn things at the level they actually need
  to learn them, but think they know a lot more than they do because they
  feel they deserve to, by virtue of knowing something else well.  all I
  can say is that it's strange that it is people with this attitude that
  call people here "primadonnas" and "all-so superior" and other evidence
  of inferiority complexes hard at work.  the fact is that there is nothing
  wrong in being a novice at something if you are an expert at something
  else -- if you really are good, you will not be a novice for long -- but
  the more you pretend you're an expert, the longer it will take to become
  one for real.

  you are free to interpret things any way you want, but you should be
  aware that I don't do _anything_ withing giving it full attention.  it's
  my one basic problem: I care too much, often about issues that other
  people are _completely_ ignorant about.

  I find it somewhat odd that you object so much to my visual layout.  most
  other people who have commented on this tell me that it is very obvious
  that I spend a lot of effort making them visually pleasing, although my
  deep respect for the capitalization of the individual word divides people
  about half and half.

I have been lurking on this group for over two years now. The
discussions on it have repeatedly taught me new ways of looking at
programming and have often made me think.

In an attempt to redress the unfairness due to satisfied people not
being vocal, let me just offer a vote of thanks to the people who have
helped in this.

I shall attempt to make my next post have more relevance to Lisp than
just my signature ;-)