Harlequin vs. Allegro
David Bakhash
Is there anyone out there who's used both Harlequin and Allegro, and
can talk about some differences, and opinions? I'm about to get a PC
running LINUX *just* so I can program in CL, but I'd like to know
why people choose one or the other.
If there's ever been a thread in this vein, then please lead me to it
in lieu of starting a new one. I do not wish to ask about religion;
just some simple stats and history (and opinions too) for a someone
who's new to CL.
dave
David Bakhash
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> writes:
>
> development environment for ACL under Linux
> is Emacs/Xemacs. Some like that, some don't.
Personally, not only do I like that, but I require it.
didn't know that Harlequin did it differently. Thanks for that info.
dave
Rainer Joswig
David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> writes:
> Is there anyone out there who's used both Harlequin and Allegro, and
> can talk about some differences, and opinions? I'm about to get a PC
> running LINUX *just* so I can program in CL, but I'd like to know
> why people choose one or the other.
I don't think LispWorks is available for Linux.
Have you checked with Harlequin?
ACL 4.3 and ACL 5.0 beta are freely available
for non-commercial use under Linux. The
Rainer Joswig
David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> writes:
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
>
> > David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> writes:
> >
> > development environment for ACL under Linux
> > is Emacs/Xemacs. Some like that, some don't.
>
> Personally, not only do I like that, but I require it.
>
> didn't know that Harlequin did it differently. Thanks for that info.
>
> dave
If I remember right, you can use LispWorks from Emacs, too.
But it also includes a full blown development environment
(multitude of browsers, editor, user interface designer,
documentation tool, etc.). Actually I prefer to
use the IDE. Even better when it comes as an OS
(like on the Lispm). ;-)
Espen Vestre
David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> writes:
> Personally, not only do I like that, but I require it.
>
> didn't know that Harlequin did it differently. Thanks for that info.
but be aware that the Harlequin editor _is_ an emacs-style editor!
As far as I remember (haven't used it except for evaluation
5 years ago) it's closer to GNUEmacs than e.g. MCL's FRED
(Fred Resembles Emacs Deliberately), which is one of my favourites
(FRED has a meager built-in command set, but then it's programmable
in CLOS - great fun!).
--
regards,
Espen
Rainer Joswig
Espen Vestre <e...@nextel.no> writes:
> but be aware that the Harlequin editor _is_ an emacs-style editor!
> As far as I remember (haven't used it except for evaluation
> 5 years ago) it's closer to GNUEmacs than e.g. MCL's FRED
That's true. Does it support fonts, color, etc? I have to check.
> (Fred Resembles Emacs Deliberately), which is one of my favourites
> (FRED has a meager built-in command set, but then it's programmable
> in CLOS - great fun!).
Well, and in MCL each text field in windows usually is a FRED.
This is cool.
Don Geddis
On Tue, 16 Jun 1998 16:52:36 GMT, Zeno <ze...@deltanet.com> wrote:
> I am going to begin programming in Lisp also, and have been looking at
> Allegro. But I am a Windows programmer for Win95 and NT. Why is it
> necessary to get a Linux box?
Allegro is available under Windows NT.
> I think there's a royalty [for Allegro] or other fee to be paid for a runtime
> version when distributing the apps.
Correct.
> Does this mean that I cannot write stand-alone applications in Lisp?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can certainly create a standalone
image and distribute it. You just have to pay Franz for that.
> If I write a program in C++ or VB and distribute it, the compiled code is
> machine language, and what I used to write it is unimportant to the user. Is
> Lisp different in this respect?
Lisp is a much larger language, with significant built-in libraries. Every
distribution of your application requires the Lisp run-time environment.
If you use some 3rd-party C-based libraries, such as numerical analysis or
GUI code, you'd also have to pay them every time you distributed the libraries
with your application. Lisp is pretty much the same, except that these
extra libraries are always required in every application.
-- Don
--
Don Geddis ged...@tesserae.com
Tesserae Information Systems, Inc. http://tesserae.com
275 Shoreline Drive, Suite 505 (650) 508-7893
Redwood Shores, CA 94065 (650) 508-7891 [fax]
David Hanley
Zeno <ze...@deltanet.com> wrote:
> I am going to begin programming in Lisp also, and have been looking at
> Allegro. But I am a Windows programmer for Win95 and NT. Why is it
> necessary to get a Linux box?
It isn't. These things are available for NT as well. In fact,
there is a free version on the franz site.
> And this stuff is expensive, isn't it? To get run time, Allegro is 6K
> for the Enterprise version, and then I think there's a royalty or
> other fee to be paid for a runtime version when distributing the apps.
> Does this mean that I cannot write stand-alone applications in Lisp?
> If I write a program in C++ or VB and distribute it, the compiled code
> is machine language, and what I used to write it is unimportant to the
> user. Is Lisp different in this respect?
No, lisp isn't different at all in this regard. C++ or VB could
charge you for distribution, they just don't. Franz has decided that this
is a good way to earn some $$ and they are doing this. People who feel it
is worth the money will pay it. Harlequin charges $600 for their product,
with no additional fees; you can distribute until you are blue in the face
and they won't charge you a dime.
Personally, i feel this is amazingly short-sighted and
counterproductive strategy on the part of franz. We sit back an decry
the success of java ( and it has been successful! ) while lisp,
obstinently superior, has languished. Do we think those free compilers,
enviornments, and tools playes a factor? Just a theory.
> Please excuse my ignorance. I have not yet read one book or written
> one line of code with Lisp.
Not at all. Happy hacking.
> On 10 Jun 1998 10:30:35 -0400, David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> wrote:
dave
Steve Gonedes
ged...@meta.Tesserae.COM (Don Geddis) writes:
< > If I write a program in C++ or VB and distribute it, the compiled code is
< > machine language, and what I used to write it is unimportant to the user. Is
< > Lisp different in this respect?
I don't really think so (but what do I know), if you compile the
program of course.
< Lisp is a much larger language, with significant built-in libraries. Every
< distribution of your application requires the Lisp run-time environment.
You can dramatically reduce the size of the runtime image by ripping
out the compiler, debugger, the developer environment (forget what
this includes exactly), and toplevel in the new acl though. You can
have a splash window under windows and link to the shared acl library
so you can do your own main (), as well. I think with windows you even
get an IDE with it (which is not emacs - again, maybe it's useful to
some). Someone should find and tell Martin that there's an `OLE'
interface :)
Under windows if you use `\' as a pathname separator you still have to
escape it though. I can't believe that windows uses the escape
character (at least in C++ as well as every other language I know) for
a pathname separator still. (pathname "\\\\somewhere\\in\\") Very odd.
Oh, well - enough late night lisp advocacy.
Eric Scott
David Hanley wrote:
>
> No, lisp isn't different at all in this regard. C++ or VB could
> charge you for distribution, they just don't. Franz has decided that this
> is a good way to earn some $$ and they are doing this. People who feel it
> is worth the money will pay it. Harlequin charges $600 for their product,
> with no additional fees; you can distribute until you are blue in the face
> and they won't charge you a dime.
>
> Personally, i feel this is amazingly short-sighted and
> counterproductive strategy on the part of franz. We sit back an decry
> the success of java ( and it has been successful! ) while lisp,
> obstinently superior, has languished. Do we think those free compilers,
> enviornments, and tools playes a factor? Just a theory.
>
I am also in Zeno's position of deciding between ACL and LispWorks. In
the
case of ACL I am put off by the price, but the project I have in mind
would
require a sizable body of persistant objects, and I am attracted to the
availability of AllegroStore. I am new to OODBMS's, and have only used
MCL's WOOD, so I'm still reading up in this area. How do users of
LispWorks
typically handle their persistant data (on an NT platform?). How happy
are
ACL user's with Allegrostore?
Thanks,
Eric Scott
Cognitive Ergonomics Research Facility
San Diego State University
Paul Meurer
>
>I am also in Zeno's position of deciding between ACL and LispWorks. In
>the
>case of ACL I am put off by the price, but the project I have in mind
>would
>require a sizable body of persistant objects, and I am attracted to the
>availability of AllegroStore. I am new to OODBMS's, and have only used
>MCL's WOOD, so I'm still reading up in this area. How do users of
>LispWorks
>typically handle their persistant data (on an NT platform?). How happy
>are
>ACL user's with Allegrostore?
>
>Thanks,
>
If you want the functionality of WOOD (and much much more) in
LispWorks (4.01 on NT), you should have a look at Heiko Kirschke's
PLOB! (Persistent Lisp Objects)
<http://www.lisp.de/software/plob/Welcome.html>. This is a
full-fledged, fast client-server object oriented database (store) for
lisp objects (with b-tree indexing, transactions etc.).
Regards,
Paul
----------------------------------------------------
Paul . Meurer /at/ hit.uib.no
Humanities Information Technology Research Programme
University of Bergen
Allégaten 27
N-5007 Bergen
Norway
Rainer Joswig
Eric Scott <eric...@schemas.sdsu.edu> writes:
> LispWorks
> typically handle their persistant data (on an NT platform?).
Since LispWorks includes an SQL/ODBC interface, you can
use databases like Oracle 8.
Greetings,
Rainer Joswig
Don Geddis
On Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:37:08 GMT, Zeno <ze...@deltanet.com> wrote:
> When you say I can distribute stand-alone apps, I take this to mean that the
> runtime version consists of a library to which we link the program? I was
> beginning to get the impression that Lisp needed some sort of shell to be
> started that it could run within.
Again, I'm not sure how technically precise you mean your question to be...
However, the answer is basically yes. Allegro Common Lisp is able to dump
a single binary image that doesn't need a shell to get it started. It would
be pretty tough for an end customer to have any idea what source language you
used to create that standalone binary image.
-- Don
--
Don Geddis ged...@tesserae.com
Tesserae Information Systems, Inc. http://tesserae.com
275 Shoreline Drive, Suite 505 (650) 508-7893
Redwood Shores, CA 94065 (650) 508-7891 [fax]
Chemistry is physics without thought; mathematics is physics without purpose.
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
| There is a huge market of people such as myself who run 1-5 person
| programming/consulting shops and cater to businesses with 5-100
| employees. Contrary to the opinions of the larger software vendors,
| Franz must have decided that there is no market for programming languages
| there, at least not for their version of Lisp, because the pricing and
| royalties put their product out of our reach.
I'm in that market. I don't have a problem with Franz Inc's pricing.
I have several friends in similar positions as myself whose employers or
project leaders appear to have little qualms about paying for a full
license, either. I'm somewhat dismayed to hear that we don't exist and
that we constitute "no market", but I think this must go to show that
your imagination is somewhat restricted to your own immediate conditions
and that you appear to think that what you cannot imagine also cannot
exist. this is the same mental illness that afflicts Microsoft victims,
who think their sorry condition extends to the whole of the universe.
the very fortunate fact is that it doesn't.
if, on the other hand, your supposed "huge market" can present itself to
Franz Inc and be profitable for them, don't think for a minute that they
wouldn't cater to it. much to my dismay, they have already decided to
cater to Microsoft victims with a 40% discount on the Professional
Edition and a 25% discount on the Enterprise Edition, which I personally
think is a disgrace -- I don't want to have to argue against using
Microsoft's demented crudware and suffering their criminal conduct based
on the price difference of the development system, and beancounters can
be trusted to bring this issue up. an Intel box can, however, run Linux
and get away with a support license slightly more espensive than a
Professional Edition license, but it still isn't great to see that people
get rewarded by a company that should reward smart choices for making the
really stupid choice that going for Microsoft is in the long run.
my current client uses Franz Inc's ACL 5.0 for Linux offering and has
purchased a service contract, and more licenses may come as this spreads
to more systems. the service contract for Linux is a little cheaper in
the short run, but not in the longer run since it costs the same every
year instead of just a maintenance fee, so the goal is to get onto a
fully supported license once Franz Inc (hopefully) decides that Linux is
worth supporting fully. in any case, the cost of the license accounts
for less than 5% of the budgeted project costs over its (minimum) 4-year
life-time, and less than 10% of the development costs the first year.
this seems to be fairly constant in my projects.
I don't find Franz Inc's pricing to put _anything_ out of reach, neither
for me nor for my clients -- on the contrary, Franz Inc's offerings have
put some very interesting work _within_ reach for me and some fairly
complex systems within reach of relatively small budgets for my clients.
would this have happened regardless of their pricing and ability to make
money and stay healthily in business? I don't think so, and that's why
I'm worrying about their subsidizing Microsoft users, too. knowing what
tremendous costs Microsoft puts over on software developers for their
cruddy "operating systems", I have a hard time understanding the prudence
of rewarding that market with huge discounts. I'm sure those who have
yet to understand what Microsoft does to the software industry appreciate
the lower entrance costs, however.
#:Erik
--
http://www.naggum.no/spam.html is about my spam protection scheme and how
to guarantee that you reach me. in brief: if you reply to a news article
of mine, be sure to include an In-Reply-To or References header with the
message-ID of that message in it. otherwise, you need to read that page.
Tim Bradshaw
* Zeno wrote:
> There is a huge market of people such as myself who run 1-5 person
> programming/consulting shops and cater to businesses with 5-100
> employees. Contrary to the opinions of the larger software vendors,
> Franz must have decided that there is no market for programming
> languages there, at least not for their version of Lisp, because the
> pricing and royalties put their product out of our reach.
I think there is a market still -- there are small organisations which
are reasonably comfortable paying high prices for software, because
even those prices are actually rather small compared to salary costs,
so if the SW does something reasonably useful it will pay for itself
quite quickly.
However I do wish Franz would not have a run-time license as it's the
source of endless pain.
--tim
Craig Brozefsky
Tim Bradshaw <t...@aiai.ed.ac.uk> writes:
> I think there is a market still -- there are small organizations which
> are reasonably comfortable paying high prices for software, because
> even those prices are actually rather small compared to salary costs,
> so if the SW does something reasonably useful it will pay for itself
> quite quickly.
And they may also be working on projects whose length and budget make
the software purchase a negligible cost. The 15k dollar runtime for
WebObjects (I think it has come down considerably) a client purchased
was such a small portion of the development budget. The 15k dollar
runtime price is still cheaper than the expenses we saved by with
reductions in development time.
> However I do wish Franz would not have a run-time license as it's the
> source of endless pain.
No, I don't think the pain is caused by the runtime license.
A problem I see, and you can determine yourself whether it's a really a
problem, is that a lot of the trade rags and mainstream development
culture is transfixed by the thought of shrink wrap software and
making it rich with a "product" that they only have to produce once
and yet can sell an infinite number of times. If you aren't an
experienced software developer you may get the impression that this is
the only kind of software that ever gets written, and the rest is just
marginalized into non-existence.
That shrink wrap mainstream development market has seen its software
tools drastically drop in price thanks to M$ predatory pricing, the
sheer volume of sales, and general ignorance amongst its users who are
unable to demand anything better than VC++ or VB. It's hard to blame
the people coming from that market considering the sheer power of
those who have cut them off from the rest of the world and engulfed
them in the war of the feature checklists. Visual Interdev is not a
development environment, it's an elaborate torture device designed to
slowly drain the life force of its users by making them pay more and
more money trying to fix the bugs in it so that they can actually get
down to the work of producing software.
A dear friend was nearly killed during one particular mission which
took him to the deepest bowels of the MSDN knowledge base (cough
cough), which base then told him to sit and wait to download the 80
meg patch to his compiler so he could pass a string between two
previously estranged COM components. If everyone is busy trying to
get their compiler to work, and spending money to join the MSDN Mickey
Mouse club, then how are they ever going to compete against Microsoft
applications? It's like trying to beat the devil about the head and
shoulders with sin.
I have personally only ever done very small amounts of development in
that horrid environment, and the trail of tears I had to follow to
spawn and kill a process was so convoluted and laced with antediluvian
traces of OSs of bygone eras, that I swore that the density of
niggling idiotic factoids a developer had to remember to navigate that
baroque (or broken) labrynth of hackery was so great that I feared
attempting to cram them into my head would break my neck.
Now if you were to then tell someone who has suffered thru this that
their dream of taking their 500 meg todo-list manager and charging 50
dollars to every middle management drone with a M$ desktop who felt
that that todo-list manager was just what he needed to acquire the
seven habits of success--pride, lust, avarice, gluttony, sloth, envy,
and anger--requires they pay a runtime license, you could expect some
of that pent up hatred and frustration to be directed at you. It
doesn't matter much what the runtime license fee is, the reaction is
not a rational one but instead is the act of a person who has been
trained thru shock therapy to point and click their way to yet another
desktop productivity app, and your now trying to take a portion of
their food pellet reward.
Sunil Mishra
Paul....@hit.uib.no (Paul Meurer) writes:
> >
> >I am also in Zeno's position of deciding between ACL and LispWorks. In
> >the
> >case of ACL I am put off by the price, but the project I have in mind
> >would
> >require a sizable body of persistant objects, and I am attracted to the
> >availability of AllegroStore. I am new to OODBMS's, and have only used
> >MCL's WOOD, so I'm still reading up in this area. How do users of
> >LispWorks
> >typically handle their persistant data (on an NT platform?). How happy
> >are
> >ACL user's with Allegrostore?
> >
> >Thanks,
You should check with Harlequin. I believe they have a product that
provides a persistent store. I had enquired about this once, and having a
price attached immediately put it out of my league. (Being a graduate
student does put a few restrictions.)
There is also a paper out there about a system which used Oracle as a
persistent store for lispworks. That might be another option worth
following up on. I would try starting at the ALU website (I think at
http://www.elmwood.com/alu/).
> If you want the functionality of WOOD (and much much more) in
> LispWorks (4.01 on NT), you should have a look at Heiko Kirschke's
> PLOB! (Persistent Lisp Objects)
> <http://www.lisp.de/software/plob/Welcome.html>. This is a
> full-fledged, fast client-server object oriented database (store) for
> lisp objects (with b-tree indexing, transactions etc.).
Unfortunately, I believe that PLOB! requires a sun (or at least a unix box)
running the C code that manages the central persistant store. I don't know
if this would work with an NT very well.
Sunil
Dan Higdon
Craig Brozefsky wrote in message <87ra0maj...@duomo.onshore.com>...
>I have personally only ever done very small amounts of development in
>that horrid environment, and the trail of tears I had to follow to
>spawn and kill a process was so convoluted and laced with antediluvian
>traces of OSs of bygone eras, that I swore that the density of
>niggling idiotic factoids a developer had to remember to navigate that
>baroque (or broken) labrynth of hackery was so great that I feared
>attempting to cram them into my head would break my neck.
Really, it's no worse than trying to puzzle through CLOS object creation
and definition. :-) Lisp programmers (in particular Common Lisp
programmers)
have to have a huge base of knowledge to work from in order to work those
environments as well. Pick your poison. Sure, Winblowz is screwy, but
CL doesn't have a lot of room to throw stones, IMHO. Now Scheme, that's
another story. :-)
<snip> [It]
>doesn't matter much what the runtime license fee is, the reaction is
>not a rational one but instead is the act of a person who has been
>trained thru shock therapy to point and click their way to yet another
>desktop productivity app, and your now trying to take a portion of
>their food pellet reward.
But the sad fact is that customers (and I'm speaking of "market customers",
NOT "clients") do feel that way. As long as you're happy to sell only to
clients (as in consulting) and not customers (as in shrinkwrap CompUSA
walk-ins), then you can safely ignore the needs of that market. A pitty
that
the customer market is rapidly growing, very large, and full of money.
----------------------------------------
hd...@charybdis.com
"Throwing fire at the sun"
Rainer Joswig
Sunil Mishra <smi...@peachtree.cc.gatech.edu> writes:
> > If you want the functionality of WOOD (and much much more) in
> > LispWorks (4.01 on NT), you should have a look at Heiko Kirschke's
> > PLOB! (Persistent Lisp Objects)
> > <http://www.lisp.de/software/plob/Welcome.html>. This is a
> > full-fledged, fast client-server object oriented database (store) for
> > lisp objects (with b-tree indexing, transactions etc.).
>
> Unfortunately, I believe that PLOB! requires a sun (or at least a unix box)
> running the C code that manages the central persistant store. I don't know
> if this would work with an NT very well.
I think Heiko has ported it to NT. See www.lisp.de for info on Plob!.
Paul Meurer
On 18 Jun 1998 11:38:40 -0400, Sunil Mishra
<smi...@peachtree.cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>
>Unfortunately, I believe that PLOB! requires a sun (or at least a unix box)
>running the C code that manages the central persistant store. I don't know
>if this would work with an NT very well.
>
>Sunil
No, the server too runs very well on NT (at least on my NT box ;-).
Look at Heiko´s site (the one i mentioned in my post).
Howard R. Stearns
As people have pointed out, Allegro and Lispworks (and MCL) represent
good value for their cost. They are very good systems with good
development environments.
Our Eclipse Common Lisp was designed and priced to reflect some
attitudes that I saw echoed on this thread:
+ People need to be able to deliver in flexible ways:
+ mixing code written in different languages
+ "delivering" not only as executable image applications, but as
libraries of various kinds.
+ the final application executable might need to be something other
than a Lisp saved image. (i.e. the main() could come from some
arbitrarilly remote part of a project).
+ Different people have different development environment preferences.
As good as emacs/fred and the Lisp vendor's debuggers are, it may be
necessary for people to use make, ld, gdb, etc. on complex,
inter-language projects These tools should be useable at various
stages in the development cycle.
+ Developers need a uniform programming library on all their platforms.
Library and compiler pricing should be the same on all platforms.
+ Finished applications that don't need such dynamic lisp features as
eval and compile at run time should be deliverable royalty-free.
Even those that do need all of the ANSI CL defined capability should
be no more than $500/seat, not $5000.
Accordingly, Eclipse:
+ is $500 per machine, regardless of platform.
+ has a text-based interface and generates human readable, lintable C
code that is compatible with K&R, ANSI C, and C++ compilers.
+ comes with a C-callable library that contains all the ANSI CL
utilities. This library is identical on all platforms. This can be
used by Lisp applications, or directly by hand-written C code.
+ does not require any royalties for applications that don't use eval,
compile and friends.
Nonetheless, we haven't seen the "huge market" described by some. Can
someone convince me that we did, in fact, view the situation correctly
and should not instead charge much more money and royalties?
Pierre Mai
Tim Bradshaw <t...@aiai.ed.ac.uk> writes:
> * Zeno wrote:
> > There is a huge market of people such as myself who run 1-5 person
> > programming/consulting shops and cater to businesses with 5-100
> > employees. Contrary to the opinions of the larger software vendors,
> > Franz must have decided that there is no market for programming
> > languages there, at least not for their version of Lisp, because the
> > pricing and royalties put their product out of our reach.
>
> I think there is a market still -- there are small organisations which
> are reasonably comfortable paying high prices for software, because
> even those prices are actually rather small compared to salary costs,
> so if the SW does something reasonably useful it will pay for itself
> quite quickly.
>
> However I do wish Franz would not have a run-time license as it's the
> source of endless pain.
>
Well, for those who don't need all of the add-on features that Franz
(or Harlequin) offer (like CLIM, Composer, AllegroStore, etc.), there
is Elwood's Eclipse Common Lisp, a full featured Common Lisp
implementation, which compiles CL-Code into readable and
"C-Conforming" ANSI C, for just 500 $ (95/NT, Linux, and IIRC Solaris
or HP versions available).
And because of it's C connectivity, interfacing with databases, GUI
toolkits, etc. should also be possible, just maybe not as easily as
with native Toolkits like those Franz provides.
OTOH one can always implement core functionality in CL, and build
thin interfaces/clients in other languages...
So it would seem, that CL _is_ within easy reach of small
organisations. BTW I'd also like to agree with Erik and Tim, because
I too think that Franz's pricing is not the problem that some people
like to suggest.
Regs, Pierre, who hasn't yet tried ECL, but might do so in the
future...
--
Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> http://home.pages.de/~trillian/
"Such is life." -- Fiona in "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (UK/1994)
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
| "no market." You're statements tell me that you are very upset with what
| I wrote, but if you have paid for something, it is consistent with normal
| human nature to become emotional while defending your expenditure as
| worthwhile. I ask you to please accept my apology, as my post was not
| intended to be any kind of attack at all.
apology accepted. I don't think the psychological reasoning is exactly
what you think, though, so in the interest of expanding horizons: I'm
upset with the "huge market/no market" dichotomy of _some_ markets,
notably the Microsoft-infested one, where there aren't winners, only one
winner, and that is whoever cons the rest to their exclusion and demise.
as you have noticed, I'm strongly anti-Microsoft-business-practices and
the attendant rippling effects of dishonesty and shoddy quality. it is
important for me to point out that such is not the whole of the world and
that people need not accept what Microsoft has to offer in any area:
software products, or business practices, or "visions" of the future, or
self-serving redefinitions of the previously useful term "innovation".
so just because a market is not the one winning and crushing the rest
doesn't mean it doesn't exist. e.g., _my_ market is tiny by any measure,
but I'm happy as a clam in my very own little niche. yet, I hear all the
time that this niche that has kept me alive and independent and happy for
15 years cannot possibly exist. _that_ gets me on the defensive.
| I spoke with a representative from Franz today, and explained my whole
| operation: its size, type of tools, customers, etc.. Everything I use is
| Microsoft or plugs into Microsoft in one way or another. I have never
| had to lay my operations out like that to a software vendor before, and
| even after I did, I was not told by the Franz representative that
| discounts existed to woo us "victims" away from this "demented crudware".
ok, that was maybe too flippant an expression on my part. if you compare
the price of a license for ACL 5.0 for Windows (95/NT) with that of the
same product for Unix (apart from Linux), you'll find that it is 40% less
for the Professional Edition and 25% less for the Enterprise Edition on
Windows, and you get the Windows-specific GUI builder, which the Unix
version does not (yet) sport. so, _effectively_, Franz Inc gives you an
unhealthy (in my view) discount for using Microsoft environments when
they _should_ have rewarded the others, instead. it also seems you got
the direction of the discount wrong -- Franz Inc is effectively wooing
people to get _onto_ the demented crudware bandwagon, not off it, which
is what I would have appreciated.
| I assume that when you refer to a "support license," this means there is
| something for the customer to pay on a regular basis. When I talked to
| Franz about royalties today, it never occurred to me to ask if they were
| a yearly fee as opposed to a one-time fee.
well, everybody in the software industry has _some_ sort of fee for
upgrades and new releases. Franz Inc's policy is that you pay a fixed
annual maintenace fee (a percentage of the full license) for unlimited
support, upgrades and new releases and your license fee establishes you
in this program for the first year. then you stay in it by paying the
annual maintenance fee for subsequent years. now, once you're in that
program, there are no other costs involved, and that's the reason I think
this policy is really workable. major releases and minor are treated the
same (for 4.3 -> 5.0, there was even a _major_ price incentive to upgrade
to the Enterprise Edition to get with the runtime deal). you don't have
to pay maintenance fees for subsequent years, though -- nothing bad
happens to you or the software if you don't. e.g., support contract or
no, maintenance fee or not, does not affect your ability to pick up
patches and bug fixes from the Franz Inc FTP site, but older releases are
obviously less frequently patched than newer releases -- after all, their
software is just expected to to _work_, not suffer from disservice packs
that break more and more previously working code.
do you need the support? in my view, yes, but the reason is not that the
product is of shoddy quality -- quite the contrary, it's that it's
enormous and that you're much better off asking for help than to spend
the time delving into the innards yourself when you want to do something
that you think should be possible. not being limited by problems has a
weird tendency to make you want to do a lot more interesting stuff...
with only a few exceptions, I have found both bug-reporting and getting
help in solving problems from Franz Inc personnell to be as good as I
would expect from the free software community, where developers take high
pride in the usefulness of their software for other developers.
| This may be a wonderful product, but upon reading your post after talking
| to Franz today, I'm starting to feel like I'm dealing with used-car
| salesmen over there.
that's odd. I feel more like I'm talking to a custom bike shop where
everybody makes every effort to ensure that I get exactly what I need. I
have actually never dealt with a company (other than my own :) that has
been as willing to spend the necessary time to secure a contract that
fits all parties' needs than Franz Inc, and I can assure you that I
_need_ the security of knowing that I have a vendor's full backing when I
take a project. my business comes from reducing the risk in very high
risk projects (often close to failing by the time I get called in) to
well within normal comfort levels, and I cannot do this without trusting
my development environment and the people behind it. Franz Inc has been
willing to take part in this process with me and they provide me with the
same kind of comfort level that I try to sell my clients. for this, I am
grateful, of course, but I'm still wholly independent of Franz Inc.
| I honestly don't know if it would do me any good to ask them if there are
| yearly fees or not, as I know the answer would be, "we're willing to
| negotiate." I'm starting to think I should have hired an agent or lawyer
| to purchase Lisp for me.
well, my experience is that good lawyers are underutilized, just like
good programmers and good languages, and that they get blamed for the
bugs they try to fix, just like bad programmers and bad languages fail to
be identified as the source of the problems they cause. good lawyers
appear to cost much up front, but they actually save you a lot in the
long run. in effect, a good lawyer who walks through a license agreement
or a contract is debugging it for you before you need to use the
government-provided post mortem analyzer of contract core dumps -- the
courts. I try very hard to optimize for small debugging costs in all my
endeavors, and I find that "debugging" applies to a lot of areas.
medical doctors, for instance, are nothing more than body debuggers when
you think about it, and you'd rather the body stays warm while they debug
it -- just about anybody can learn to patch a human body if they believe
strongly enough in reincarnation, which most programmers seem to do.
by the way, if you had had a good lawyer read your license agreements
with Microsoft before you entered them, you would _never_ have used their
products. more and more companies are finding out the hard way what they
have actually agreed to -- Microsoft is aiming at becoming a legislatory
body all their own. so if you (happily) accept Microsoft's mafia-like
"license" terms, I don't understand why you have problems with Franz
Inc's very decent licensing terms, but maybe you haven't actually seen
them, or you expect to just sign them and smile. professional contract
law doesn't work that way -- both parties have interests that need
protection, and although it has taken some getting used from my country's
legal heritage, such contracts are _supposed_ to negotiated. (I hear
they are moving towards "shrink-wrap" licenses, however, a move to which
I am strongly opposed -- not the least of reasons being that European
courts have argued (and quite strongly) that you cannot be held
responsible for the terms of licenses simply after an unverified click on
some button -- anyone could have done that without the authority that
accepting the legal responsibilities for the license requires, and nobody
can be held legally responsible for license terms that are "accepted"
just because you clicked on a _previous_ version of the same.)
| You seem quite pleased that you will be able to sell more service
| contracts. I am afraid that in my ignorance, I do not know if these are
| your service contracts or service contracts you are selling for Franz.
well, I have my own license, but when I develop software for a client at
their premises or computers, my client must obtain a license for Allegro
CL, as well. if I were to develop the software in-house and sell it to a
client with a run-time license, that would entangle me in a lot of legal
snares in this country, not to mention that it would cost 23% more
because consulting is not (yet) subject to sales tax, but sold products
to which the vendor retains all rights is, even if only one copy is ever
sold. in less idiotically run countries, other conditions might apply.
to me, therefore, a development contract requires an Allegro CL license
for my client, and I usually handle everything except signing the actual
license papers as part of the contract setup. I have handled all the
negotiations with Franz Inc in the past and see no reason to stop doing
that for future contracts, either, but, again, I am not acting as a
reseller for Franz Inc for legal reasons -- I would have had to assume a
number of complicated responsibilities if I were. in a less idiotically
run country, this might again be (very) different.
I don't view myself as selling licenses for Franz Inc. I view Franz Inc
as enabling me to do seriously challenging stuff and make a fun living
doing software development again (after a bunch of years when I felt I
was caged in by C/C++), and all it requires me to do is ensure that my
clients are Franz Inc customers, too. and apparently, Franz Inc is as
happy with this arrangement as I am.
| If they are for Franz, I would be interested to know what service this
| is. I am not trying to be flippant or aggressive here. I honestly do
| not know if Franz goes to the customer's site or not. At this point, if
| you told me that your customers must pay a yearly fee because you
| developed your software with Franz tools, I doubt if I would be
| surprised.
well, be prepared to be surprised, because this is not so at all. nobody
can enforce an annual service fee unless the contract terms are really
hostile -- if you had had a lawyer go through your licenses to check for
such "design flaws", it would not even cross your mind to accept anything
like it. some predatory companies _may_ get away with it because they
don't accept that you want to negotiate their licensing terms with them
if you don't like them. Franz Inc isn't like that.
however, if the customer enters a support contract with me for subsequent
years (and most do -- they provide a comfortable sustained income), they
would need most probably want to pay the maintance fee, because I promise
to upgrade the software and fix bugs and improve performance problems and
ensure that they can switch to new hardware or operating systems if they
so desire, etc, etc, and that means they would need the upgrade policy
from Franz Inc, as well as their cooperation in switching platforms. if
the software performs to their _complete_ satisfaction on hardware that
doesn't need replacement, either, and they decide that they don't need a
support contract with me or with Franz Inc, they would be free to abandon
either of them.
| You see, I must be missing some major pieces of the puzzle, and for that
| I am sorry. If Franz's offerings provide you with work, then you must be
| acquiring clients because they're already sold on the idea of a Lisp
| system, and no one else's comes close to Franz in quality; they're
| already sold of Franz Lisp; or Franz supplies you with customers
| directly. Or perhaps I have missed something yet again.
ah, no, here's how it goes: somebody has a huge problem on their hands
that they cannot solve, and they risk losing lots of money (millions) or
have a moderate amount of money (whatever it takes to keep me and my cat
and optionally a co-worker happy for a year, say) to spend on a freshly
consed solution. so they call me do to project garbage collection.
(pardon the Lisp puns.) I spend some time figuring out whether I can be
entirely safe in promising that I can solve their problems and make their
risks of loss go away. about half the time, I cannot determine that I
would not acquire all the risks instead of removing them, so I decline to
take the project, or decide to help them in other ways, such as expert
witness in a lawsuit against the bastards who defrauded them, so they can
at least recover some of their losses that way. if I take the project,
it's because I have the means to remove their risks and make their
systems work as they expected them to and hoped they would, and often I
discover what people _really_ wanted only after they got what they
thought they wanted (and this is also very rewarding). I have yet to
meet a manager who has not listened to my choices and recommendations for
hardware and software platforms at this point, but as long as people know
that I'm willing to endure Microsoft's version of Hell only when it does
not mean I'm woul compromise any other aspect of the system's performance
or predictable behavior, I guess I just don't get calls from die-hard
Microsoft fans and other Management-by-Magazine-type managers who try to
tell me what I must do when all we know about what they told the last guy
to do got them into all of these problems to begin with. :)
| The part that I don't get is the royalties. When I called Franz about
| this today, they told me it was a percentage of what I sold the software
| for.
as should be clear by now, I am unfamiliar with this part of Franz Inc's
policies since I don't provide anyone with finished applications with a
runtime license. my delivered systems are expected to continue to run in
their development environment. (this is in fact part of the attraction
with the way I work with my clients.)
| I asked what they were willing to invest in my company, because no one
| gets part of the sale if they don't invest something in the business, the
| answer was, "We don't invest in our customer's businesses."
that must have been the purely financial answer and as such it is
probably right on the money. (I find your expectations very strange, by
the way. you have to pay royalties for the dissemintation of copies a
number of other types of intellectual property goods, and you never see
their creators invest in their (re)-sellers. I wonder how you got the
idea that the two would be tied together. was it only that the runtime
license fee is not fixed but a fraction of the price of the application,
or were other factors involved?)
apart from the financial aspects, I think Franz Inc has invested a lot in
my company and my work and my ability to serve my clients well. I have
also placed very high demands on them for my contracts and come to them
with high expectations, which they have consistently been able to fill,
albeit sometimes after intense negotiations, but this is to be expected,
in my view -- the assurances I give my clients aren't trivial, either,
and I am responsible for the whole chain of them when I accept a project.
| Franz calls their customers VARs.
I have not had that term applied to me, so, again, I cannot relate.
| Please try to understand that my goal here is not to argue against
| something I know absolutely nothing about.
I have gathered as much, and I appreciate your willingness to ask and
listen to contrary views. I hope my answers have been helpful. (I do
wish you'd sign with a full name, though.)
Erik Naggum
* Dan Higdon
| But the sad fact is that customers (and I'm speaking of "market
| customers", NOT "clients") do feel that way. As long as you're happy to
| sell only to clients (as in consulting) and not customers (as in
| shrinkwrap CompUSA walk-ins), then you can safely ignore the needs of
| that market. A pitty that the customer market is rapidly growing, very
| large, and full of money.
well, my (admittedly myopic) experience is that the "client" market grows
faster than the "customer" market because of the inherent problems in
being a customer of *huge* mass-marketing corporations who care about as
much about you as they did about he software they sold you, and that
people have acquired a greater taste and expectations for programmability
than they did in the past, ironically both because of and in spite of the
mass-marketed software. because of "scripting" and various programmable
packages, it is no longer a given that people write in assembly-language
or COBOL and spend gobs and gobs of money on trivialties. instead, we
can spend the money on adapting dynamically to the customer's _real_
needs, which differ in progressively starker ways from what some Seattle
outfits appear to think. languages like Common Lisp and Smalltalk, and
to a lesser extent newcomers like Java, are able to do capture this mode
development for "clients". C++ and its ilk are not. today's computers
are finally catching up to the demands of dynamic customer desires, and
those who discover that static software is what they get as "customers"
stop being just plain customers.
Espen Vestre
Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> writes:
> version does not (yet) sport. so, _effectively_, Franz Inc gives you an
> unhealthy (in my view) discount for using Microsoft environments when
> they _should_ have rewarded the others, instead. it also seems you got
> the direction of the discount wrong -- Franz Inc is effectively wooing
> people to get _onto_ the demented crudware bandwagon, not off it, which
> is what I would have appreciated.
ACL actually was _bundled_ with the original NeXt cube!
(...good old days....)
--
(espen vestre)
Stig Hemmer
ze...@deltanet.com (Zeno) writes:
> On 18 Jun 1998 08:33:43 +0000, Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> wrote:
> You are right about my not stretching my imagination enough to
> understand that there are small shops out there who wish to give a
> percentage of their profits to the maker of the tools they use to
> produce their software. I stand corrected and now understand that
> there are.
Profit is income minus expenses.
The fees to Franz is not part of your profit, it is part of your
expenses, like salary, rent, new hardware every few years, etc.
> The part that I don't get is the royalties. When I called Franz about
> this today, they told me it was a percentage of what I sold the
> software for. I asked what they were willing to invest in my company,
> because no one gets part of the sale if they don't invest something in
> the business, the answer was, "We don't invest in our customer's
> businesses."
Do the people you buy hardware from own a part of the company?
If no, why should Franz?
Stig Hemmer, who has no connection to Franz.
Rainer Joswig
Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:
> So it would seem, that CL _is_ within easy reach of small
> organisations. BTW I'd also like to agree with Erik and Tim, because
> I too think that Franz's pricing is not the problem that some people
> like to suggest.
Hmm, imagine I want to install a web server based on CL-HTTP and
CL. Would I need to pay for each web server installed?
Imagine I want to use CL as a replacement for the various
sh,csh,Perl,C languages under Unix with some batch
processing running every now and then in CL. Do I need to pay
for every concurrent running batch system on every
machine? Would I need a ***site*** ***license***?
Solaris on Intel - supported?
For one Lisp development system (CL+CLIM+IDE) on Unix I would
have to pay around 15000 DM? Actually the quality of most CLIM
implementations is pathetic. Some of the IDEs are not very
convincing, either. Delivery starts with multi-multi megabyte
images?
Rainer Joswig
Espen Vestre <e...@nextel.no> writes:
> Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> writes:
>
> > version does not (yet) sport. so, _effectively_, Franz Inc gives you an
> > unhealthy (in my view) discount for using Microsoft environments when
> > they _should_ have rewarded the others, instead. it also seems you got
> > the direction of the discount wrong -- Franz Inc is effectively wooing
> > people to get _onto_ the demented crudware bandwagon, not off it, which
> > is what I would have appreciated.
>
> ACL actually was _bundled_ with the original NeXt cube!
>
> (...good old days....)
Symbolics Common Lisp is still bundled with the Symbolics Lisp machines. ;-)
Tim Bradshaw
* Rainer Joswig wrote:
> Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:
>> I too think that Franz's pricing is not the problem that some people
>> like to suggest.
> Hmm, imagine I want to install a web server based on CL-HTTP and
> CL. Would I need to pay for each web server installed?
I think that you're arguing at cross purposes. Of course the run-time
royalty *limits* the applications. In particular it limits
wide-spread use of the product for low cost commercial apps. That's
why I think it's a bad thing on the whole.
But, for some purposes (including some `small company' purposes) the
run-time royalty is not a problem. In particular, if the SW is giving
you a significant financial or time benefit then the royalty is just
trivial. If I'm proposing buying a data mining system at L250,000 a
license, I really am not going to stress about the runtime license for
xyz product. If I'm selling some CL-HTTP-based product at L50,000 a
license, then I'm not stressing about the license.
In fact run-time royalties are a bit like GCs. They make your
application rather slower or more expensive than optimal hand-crafted
memory management or a free-runtime. But we put up with the GC!
The crucial difference is that the GC overhead is pretty unavoidable,
while any vendor can opt not to charge a runtime license. But it is
only worth not charging a license if not doing so causes sales of
development licenses to increase enough to cover the lost revenue from
the runtime licenses. I doubt if that is the case for Allegro --
other things are holding CL back. But I could be wrong -- there could
be a whole mass of low-value things which aren't getting written
because of the royalty costs (but why aren't people writing them in
CMUCL/gcl?).
--tim
Will Hartung
Tim Bradshaw <t...@aiai.ed.ac.uk> writes:
>* Rainer Joswig wrote:
>I think that you're arguing at cross purposes. Of course the run-time
>royalty *limits* the applications. In particular it limits
>wide-spread use of the product for low cost commercial apps. That's
>why I think it's a bad thing on the whole.
To me, the biggest limitation of both the high entry cost, and the
runtime distribution policy of Franz is that it limits accessibility
to the experimenting, dabbling, proof-of-concept market.
Franz's Linux release mitigates this somewhat, but if someone wanted
to create a small application for Windoze, and then even give it away
to others, that would not be practical with Franz's Windows based
product.
For some stuff I'm doing, I needed to have connectivity to my database,
and while I may have been able to hack something up using Linux and
ACL, it was far easier to spend the $500 on Harlequins LWW with its
ODBC connection. If that path wasn't available, then I'd be SOL. The
cost of entry would have been lots-o-$$$ or lots-o-time hacking nutty
glueware to get process A to talk to database B, when I'd rather just
be experiementing with the project at hand.
Those were the compelling factors for me choosing LWW.
If my little project has success, then I've got CL making inroads into
a corporate environment. If it doesn't work out, I'm out $500 (though
not really).
And without the low experimenting entry point of LWW, I proabaly
wouldn't have tried the project at all, because I wasn't motivated
enough to do it in a language that does nothing but get in my way
during the entire experiment.
So, win-win IMHO.
--
Will Hartung - Rancho Santa Margarita. It's a dry heat. vfr...@netcom.com
1990 VFR750 - VFR=Very Red "Ho, HaHa, Dodge, Parry, Spin, HA! THRUST!"
1993 Explorer - Cage? Hell, it's a prison. -D. Duck
Brad Might
So we've seen a lot of debate about the business models. How about
some discussion of the technical merits of these products?
Erik Naggum
* Rainer Joswig
| Hmm, imagine I want to install a web server based on CL-HTTP and CL.
| Would I need to pay for each web server installed?
I think it would make sense to draw up a proposal and present it to the
vendors and see what they say to some concrete work of yours. you can
imagine just about anything, but that doesn't mean anybody else should
take it seriously enough to tell you what they would do _if_ you got
around to do it.
also, I don't think it will work to pose hypothetical questions in an
attempt to embarrass those who obviously think they're doing the right
thing. again, anyone can ask any question -- the important issue is what
they will do with the answers. if "nothing" is the reply, I think it's
disingenious to ask it in the first place.
William Paul Vrotney
In article <w6emwlb...@gromit.nextel.no> Espen Vestre <e...@nextel.no>
writes:
>
> Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> writes:
>
> > version does not (yet) sport. so, _effectively_, Franz Inc gives you an
> > unhealthy (in my view) discount for using Microsoft environments when
> > they _should_ have rewarded the others, instead. it also seems you got
> > the direction of the discount wrong -- Franz Inc is effectively wooing
> > people to get _onto_ the demented crudware bandwagon, not off it, which
> > is what I would have appreciated.
>
> ACL actually was _bundled_ with the original NeXt cube!
>
> (...good old days....)
>
Good old days is right, not only for Lisp but for NeXT! McCarthy and Jobs
were men ahead of their time. It is too bad that society's macho attitude
has to continually doom itself to mediocrity until enlightenment. In the
mean time it is up to us to keep Lisp alive and evolving until
enlightenment. Don't count on Lisp vendors, they are helplessly bound to
market share.
--
William P. Vrotney - vro...@netcom.com
Pierre Mai
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> > So it would seem, that CL _is_ within easy reach of small
> > organisations. BTW I'd also like to agree with Erik and Tim, because
> > I too think that Franz's pricing is not the problem that some people
> > like to suggest.
>
> Hmm, imagine I want to install a web server based on CL-HTTP and
> CL. Would I need to pay for each web server installed?
Well, the same applies to running web servers of Lisp Machines, or of
Genera on OSF, IIRC.
Now I don't know how many web servers you install (in your job this
might be many, I know), but most organizations not specialized on
Internet-connectivity would not install that many servers, and thus
might not see a problem with this...
If OTOH you plan to develop a very clever, easy to administer web
server (maybe based on CL-HTTP, though I wonder whether the license
would allow this), and wanted to sell this to xxx customers, each
running on YYYY machines, then you might run into problems
with ACL. But OTOH Franz seems to be quite cooperative if you talk to
them, so maybe a satisfactory deal could be arranged for...
Then again, maybe ACL is not the right choice for _you_, if you plan
on doing this, and other choices might be better, like e.g. MCL, ECL,
LWW, CMU CL, etc. (MCL seems to be a preferred choice for web servers
based on CL-HTTP, see e.g. "Patching onto the Web: Common Lisp
Hypermedia for the Intranet", CACM May 1997, pp. 66).
Of course we all would love to get the whole Allegro suite for a few
hundred dollars, with royalty-free redistribution, and free upgrades,
etc. And we all would love to have Digitool enter the Unix, Linux
and/or WinNT markets with their nice product, or to get CLIM for free,
or to get Sun to modify the JVM to better support dynamic languages,
etc. etc. etc.
Yet these decisions don't seem to make economic sense for the
companies involved (whether this would bear out in reality or not
might be debatable, of course), so they don't do it. And for this I
really cannot blame them, because the last thing I want is that another
Lisp vendor bites the dust.
BTW: The criticism aimed at Franz (too expensive), has been aimed at
Digitool often enough, although their product is an order of magnitude
cheaper. Still it isn't "cheap enough", i.e. it doesn't cost less
than the throw away IDEs for Java currently being offered.
> Imagine I want to use CL as a replacement for the various
> sh,csh,Perl,C languages under Unix with some batch
> processing running every now and then in CL. Do I need to pay
> for every concurrent running batch system on every
> machine? Would I need a ***site*** ***license***?
For this kind of job, I would try CLISP, since it not only is free,
but also has a small foot-print and short startup time. Or maybe
scsh, though this is scheme.
> Solaris on Intel - supported?
Does MCL support Solaris on Intel? No? Yet surely MCL is a usable,
worthy product, or your employer wouldn't be distributing it for the
german market, would he?
> For one Lisp development system (CL+CLIM+IDE) on Unix I would
> have to pay around 15000 DM? Actually the quality of most CLIM
> implementations is pathetic. Some of the IDEs are not very
> convincing, either. Delivery starts with multi-multi megabyte
> images?
Well, then don't buy ACL! I'm surely not promoting ACL for each and every
use. I have recently pointed out ECL as a very attractive alternative
(see also my reply to Howard Stearns) for some applications, and LWW, MCL
and above all things CMU CL and CLISP are also very attractive for some of
the things one can do with CL. One size most surely doesn't fit
all...
But for the things _I_ do with CL, most of the problems you mention
just don't apply: Currently I'm redeveloping an extensive in-house
simulation-suite (originally developed in C++ and tcl/tk with some
perl) in CL for an industrial client[1]. They most surely don't give a
toss about multi megabyte images, because the data-volume produced by
these simulations is > 100MB. User-interfacing is also not a problem,
since this is decoupled from the simulation processes, and could be
handled in any language, and we have some investment in a tcl/tk-based
visualization tool which we will be leveraging in the short-run.
Actually, we currently are using CMU CL, because this is filling our
needs quite well at the moment[2], and most other vendors don't support
all the platforms we need[3]. But currently there are some platform
decisions being taken, and we are still considering alternative
implementations, with ACL and ECL being at the forefront of our
considerations... I would love to consider LWW and MCL, but
non-availability on Linux and/or OSF just precludes this.
So my main argument remains: Although price _is_ an attribute to
consider, there are many more attributes of a product that influence
purchase decisions. Also it would seem, that some of those who can't
afford to or don't want to pay the price for ACL, don't really need
all the features it has to offer, and might be better off with another
product.
Regs, Pierre.
PS: Sorry this response got so long...
Footnotes:
[1] The decision for CL was taken, after it got quite clear, that
this kind of redevelopment was impossible to do in C++, given the
constraints in manpower and time. This of course influences the
willingness to spend some money on the tools needed...
[2] Things might change, maybe because of the need for better
integration with SAP R/3, which might require ODBC connectivity, etc.,
etc.
[3] At least Linux on Intel and Digital OSF on Alpha, though Linux on
Alpha would also be nice..
Rainer Joswig
Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:
> > Hmm, imagine I want to install a web server based on CL-HTTP and
> > CL. Would I need to pay for each web server installed?
>
> Well, the same applies to running web servers of Lisp Machines, or of
> Genera on OSF, IIRC.
I guess you can't compare these.
> If OTOH you plan to develop a very clever, easy to administer web
> server (maybe based on CL-HTTP, though I wonder whether the license
> would allow this),
Why not?
> Then again, maybe ACL is not the right choice for _you_, if you plan
> on doing this, and other choices might be better, like e.g. MCL, ECL,
> LWW, CMU CL, etc. (MCL seems to be a preferred choice for web servers
> based on CL-HTTP, see e.g. "Patching onto the Web: Common Lisp
> Hypermedia for the Intranet", CACM May 1997, pp. 66).
The Mac is a poor choice for Internet services in certain areas
due to cooperative multi-tasking, unsafe OS, lack of basic remote
administration facilities, etc. Still I like the OS for its interface and for MCL.
I'm about to get one of those superfast new G3 Powerbooks for
my personal MCL hacking. :-)
> etc. And we all would love to have Digitool enter the Unix, Linux
> and/or WinNT markets with their nice product, or to get CLIM for free,
> or to get Sun to modify the JVM to better support dynamic languages,
> etc. etc. etc.
Actually Harlequin's LispWorks for Windows has that attractive pricing and
royalty free delivery. Their product has good potential but it also
has some rough edges.
> really cannot blame them, because the last thing I want is that another
> Lisp vendor bites the dust.
Actually Lisp vendors seem to be quite stable. The last vendor
(Lucid) got killed by their C++ adventure, if I remember correctly.
Since then Eclipse CL has been added to the list of Lisp implementations.
> Digitool often enough, although their product is an order of magnitude
> cheaper. Still it isn't "cheap enough", i.e. it doesn't cost less
> than the throw away IDEs for Java currently being offered.
MCL is cheap enough, IMHO. One guy bought an educational copy. A month later
he sold his C++ books at a local bulletin board. ;-)
> For this kind of job, I would try CLISP, since it not only is free,
> but also has a small foot-print and short startup time. Or maybe
> scsh, though this is scheme.
We have been using both. Clisp is very nice. Still it lacks some basic
things (no CLIM, no CL-HTTP, no threads, debugging is not that
comfortable, redefinable classes
with updating objects, ...). SCSH is very useful, too. But we are going
away from Scheme if possible to concentrate on one language.
> > Solaris on Intel - supported?
>
> Does MCL support Solaris on Intel? No?
MCL is a Mac-only product specifically targetted at the Mac OS.
> Well, then don't buy ACL!
Sigh. ;-)
> But for the things _I_ do with CL, most of the problems you mention
> just don't apply: Currently I'm redeveloping an extensive in-house
> simulation-suite (originally developed in C++ and tcl/tk with some
> perl) in CL for an industrial client[1]. They most surely don't give a
> toss about multi megabyte images, because the data-volume produced by
> these simulations is > 100MB. User-interfacing is also not a problem,
> since this is decoupled from the simulation processes, and could be
> handled in any language, and we have some investment in a tcl/tk-based
> visualization tool which we will be leveraging in the short-run.
> So my main argument remains: Although price _is_ an attribute to
> consider, there are many more attributes of a product that influence
> purchase decisions.
No doubt about it. I just have the impression of the universality
of the Lispm environment. I would want similar things
on another OS (or better a modern Lispm). The Lispm
offers me the small application footprint, TCP/IP services
and a lot of high-level stuff written in Lisp (well, with
a lot of source). I would like to see more infrastructure
in Lisp with a clear software architecture and good
reusability.
> Also it would seem, that some of those who can't
> afford to or don't want to pay the price for ACL, don't really need
> all the features it has to offer, and might be better off with another
> product.
What makes ACL very attractive to me is that it is widely used and
runs a lot of software.
Btw., sounds like you have an exciting project.
Greetings,
Rainer Joswig
Pierre Mai
"Howard R. Stearns" <how...@elwood.com> writes:
> Accordingly, Eclipse:
> + is $500 per machine, regardless of platform.
> + has a text-based interface and generates human readable, lintable C
> code that is compatible with K&R, ANSI C, and C++ compilers.
> + comes with a C-callable library that contains all the ANSI CL
> utilities. This library is identical on all platforms. This can be
> used by Lisp applications, or directly by hand-written C code.
> + does not require any royalties for applications that don't use eval,
> compile and friends.
>
> Nonetheless, we haven't seen the "huge market" described by some. Can
> someone convince me that we did, in fact, view the situation correctly
> and should not instead charge much more money and royalties?
Although I have argued that ACL's price is not that much of a
problem, I'm equally prepared to try to convince you, that you
should continue ECL's pricing policy. IMHO there are projects and
customers who need the features and pricing ECL is offering, and
ECL _is_ IMHO a very promising[1] product, even for those who
don't need some of the capabilities ECL is sporting, like e.g. me.
So you should IMHO see at least a decent market. As to the "huge
market" seen by some -- I sometimes think that this is just another
instance of the following line of reasoning:
A: Lisp is cool, great whatever, _BUT_ I can't use it, because it
doesn't do X.
B: Ok, here you have an implementation which either does X out of the
box, or can easily be extended to do X.
A: Well yes, but it doesn't provide feature Y...
B: Ok, here you have ....
A: Well yes, but it doesn't interoperate with Tool/BS Z...
B: Ok, but if you do this, you can do ....
A: Ok, Ok, but CL costs way too much...
....
I.e. no matter what features you provide, and what pricing policy you
adopt, there will always be "just another something" that's still
missing, and if you provide that, too, there will be a whole mass of
customers of product XYZ who will be jumping up and down to change
over to your product...
Since ECL has already provided much of the wishlist, the customers
might just be waiting for you to provide a flashy IDE or
(cross-plattform) GUI package. I don't see the problem here, because
using ECL with existing C-based GUIs and even GUI-Builders shouldn't
be much of a problem. Of course CLIM might be nicer from a Lisp POV,
but this is exactly the point: Start using Lisp _now_, and don't wait
for the perfect, ultimate "can-do-everything" tool to appear
magically. Linux wouldn't exist, if more people had thought this way
at the beginning, and most other software, too.
So IMHO ECL is filling an important market place, which maybe has not
yet revealed it's full potential, and it would really be sad, if
Elwood would (have to) change it's pricing strategy.
Regs, Pierre.
Footnotes:
[1] I'd like to say great, or even astonishing here, but I haven't
(yet) had the chance to use ECL in a project, so I'm sadly not in the
position to comment further... ;( But this might change in the near
future... ;)
Pierre Mai
Hi Rainer!
Seems we agree more, than we disagree... ;)
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> > If OTOH you plan to develop a very clever, easy to administer web
> > server (maybe based on CL-HTTP, though I wonder whether the license
> > would allow this),
>
> Why not?
I just had the impression that the CL-HTTP license was somewhat
restrictive when it comes to remarketing, but this might just've
been my imagination (haven't looked to deeply at the license for quite
some time)...
> The Mac is a poor choice for Internet services in certain areas
> due to cooperative multi-tasking, unsafe OS, lack of basic remote
> administration facilities, etc. Still I like the OS for its interface and for MCL.
> I'm about to get one of those superfast new G3 Powerbooks for
> my personal MCL hacking. :-)
Seems I should be getting a cheap PowerMac to get a chance to use
MCL <g>. I sure would like Digitool to enter the Unix/Linux arena
(though there probably would be some loss of functionality, since the
Unix arena has nothing to compete with the MacOS's interface
toolkits). Maybe Rhapsody is the solution? Who knows...
> Actually Harlequin's LispWorks for Windows has that attractive pricing and
> royalty free delivery. Their product has good potential but it also
> has some rough edges.
Yes, LWW looks interesting, but sadly there is no version for Linux
(or FreeBSD, ...) which especially my current client is starting to
use more and more...
In the same vain, ECL also looks very interesting, although it focuses
on a slightly different segment of the Lisp market than LWW does...
> MCL is cheap enough, IMHO. One guy bought an educational copy. A month later
> he sold his C++ books at a local bulletin board. ;-)
Well, for me MCL also seems cheap enough, but then again I never
bought one of those throw away IDEs ;)
> We have been using both. Clisp is very nice. Still it lacks some basic
> things (no CLIM, no CL-HTTP, no threads, debugging is not that
> comfortable, redefinable classes
> with updating objects, ...). SCSH is very useful, too. But we are
> going
Well, I wouldn't call most of these things "basic", but your point
is well taken. OTOH CLISP probably would not sport it's small
memory-footprint, if all of those features were included...
> away from Scheme if possible to concentrate on one language.
Yes, I've often come across very nice Scheme implementations (like
e.g. MzScheme/DrScheme), but since I'm more of a CL guy, I haven't
been able to use them for more than personal use...
> MCL is a Mac-only product specifically targetted at the Mac OS.
Yes, I know, I was just trying to make the point...
> No doubt about it. I just have the impression of the universality
> of the Lispm environment. I would want similar things
> on another OS (or better a modern Lispm). The Lispm
> offers me the small application footprint, TCP/IP services
> and a lot of high-level stuff written in Lisp (well, with
> a lot of source). I would like to see more infrastructure
> in Lisp with a clear software architecture and good
> reusability.
<DREAM>
Yes, this is also something I'd like to see, although I'd be weary of
another monolithic niche product like the LispMs (which weren't
"cheap" either). Also it isn't quite clear whether universality is
attainable nowadays, since the Lisp user community has diversified
further, e.g. I don't see how you'd sell the idea of another LispM to
someone who comes from the Windows world, and wants a better
replacement for VB, Delphi or VC++. Offerings like Harlequins Dylan
or LWW seem to be much more in line with their needs...
I'd rather try to get a "LispOS" environment that is not monolithic,
but permits varying depths of "Lispyness", e.g. you could host it on
top of another OS, with varying degrees of integration, and you could
go down to just above the hardware level (e.g. based on a microkernel,
for easy portability). And all of this would still enable your
applications to run unchanged...
Given this, and some really cheap high-powered hardware (like e.g. the
ARM-based NetWinder products from Corel Computing could become), you
could develop on a pure LispOS machine, and deploy on stock Intel/MS
plattforms. And once your client has seen "the light", you could
switch over to "custom" LispOS hardware, for an increase in
power/buck...
</DREAM>
Well, this would probably require more developers than there are
current Lisp users, so maybe not ...
> Btw., sounds like you have an exciting project.
<g> thanks, though I'm of course very jeallous of you, because you get
to play with LispMs, and your current project seems quite interesting,
too... ;)
Regs, Pierre.
Rainer Joswig
Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:
> Hi Rainer!
>
> Seems we agree more, than we disagree... ;)
Ja. ;-)
> Seems I should be getting a cheap PowerMac to get a chance to use
> MCL <g>. I sure would like Digitool to enter the Unix/Linux arena
> (though there probably would be some loss of functionality, since the
> Unix arena has nothing to compete with the MacOS's interface
> toolkits). Maybe Rhapsody is the solution? Who knows...
Rhapsody is dead. MacOS X is the plan de jour. Sigh.
> Well, I wouldn't call most of these things "basic", but your point
> is well taken. OTOH CLISP probably would not sport it's small
> memory-footprint, if all of those features were included...
Hmm, MCL always has a very small memory footprint (not as small as CLisp,
though). A lot of people were starting programming with early MCL
versions on early Mac 68k machines with 8 MB RAM.
> further, e.g. I don't see how you'd sell the idea of another LispM to
> someone who comes from the Windows world, and wants a better
> replacement for VB, Delphi or VC++. Offerings like Harlequins Dylan
> or LWW seem to be much more in line with their needs...
True. But I think there are other markets. Btw., what will happen when
somebody (DoJ mabe) stops MS? The monopoly of MS is absolutely damaging
and I'm not going to shovel more money than necessary into
the pockets of Bill.
> I'd rather try to get a "LispOS" environment that is not monolithic,
> but permits varying depths of "Lispyness", e.g. you could host it on
> top of another OS, with varying degrees of integration, and you could
> go down to just above the hardware level (e.g. based on a microkernel,
> for easy portability). And all of this would still enable your
> applications to run unchanged...
Sounds good.
> Well, this would probably require more developers than there are
> current Lisp users, so maybe not ...
I guess one would have to reactivate a lot of knowledgeable people that
have been moving away.
Greetings,
Rainer
Espen Vestre
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> Rhapsody is dead. MacOS X is the plan de jour. Sigh.
Steve Jobs wasn't very lucky with his marketing lately.
As I read it, Mac OS X IS Rhapsody 2.0, in fact it has
all the features of Rhapsody 1.0 plus some more. The only important
change is that the now very unsure fate of Rhapsody on Intel.
> Hmm, MCL always has a very small memory footprint (not as small as CLisp,
> though). A lot of people were starting programming with early MCL
> versions on early Mac 68k machines with 8 MB RAM.
8MB RAM was a luxury, I developed experimental natural language software
on a Mac SE (8Mhz 68000) with 2.5MB RAM and (what luxury!) a 16Mhz Mac
IIX with 5MB RAM. The versions before 1.3 would even run, although
with tremendous GCing and room only for toy apps, on 1MB machines :-)
--
(espen)
Tim Bradshaw
* Will Hartung wrote:
> Franz's Linux release mitigates this somewhat, but if someone wanted
> to create a small application for Windoze, and then even give it away
> to others, that would not be practical with Franz's Windows based
> product.
I don't think this is correct -- if you give away the resulting
application I think the runtime license is free. This is the case for
our Solaris license anyway, but it might be some strange academic-only
license or something.
--tim
Rainer Joswig
Espen Vestre <e...@nextel.no> writes:
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
>
> > Rhapsody is dead. MacOS X is the plan de jour. Sigh.
>
> Steve Jobs wasn't very lucky with his marketing lately.
> As I read it, Mac OS X IS Rhapsody 2.0, in fact it has
> all the features of Rhapsody 1.0 plus some more. The only important
> change is that the now very unsure fate of Rhapsody on Intel.
See for example this interview with Ken Bereskin, Apple's director of
operating system strategies (an oxymoron?):
http://www.maccentral.com/news/9806/18.x_part1.shtml
My favorite question is the one about the difference between
Copland and Mac OS X.
One of the strengths of Lisp is that it doesn't have to follow
every short term trend. I guess it is very wise not
to follow Apple to early.
Btw., is there any "official" festivity/conference/workshop remembering
the 40 years of Lisp and its influence? What would be the
official date for this?
> > Hmm, MCL always has a very small memory footprint (not as small as CLisp,
> > though). A lot of people were starting programming with early MCL
> > versions on early Mac 68k machines with 8 MB RAM.
>
> 8MB RAM was a luxury, I developed experimental natural language software
> on a Mac SE (8Mhz 68000) with 2.5MB RAM and (what luxury!) a 16Mhz Mac
> IIX with 5MB RAM. The versions before 1.3 would even run, although
> with tremendous GCing and room only for toy apps, on 1MB machines :-)
I started to use Lisp on Macs OS on a Atari ST 1040 (1 MB)
with a Mac emulator. ;-) I guees, I still have Experlisp on floppy
disks.
Pierre Mai
Espen Vestre <e...@nextel.no> writes:
> 8MB RAM was a luxury, I developed experimental natural language software
> on a Mac SE (8Mhz 68000) with 2.5MB RAM and (what luxury!) a 16Mhz Mac
> IIX with 5MB RAM. The versions before 1.3 would even run, although
> with tremendous GCing and room only for toy apps, on 1MB machines
> :-)
Since there are 8MB cards for the PalmPilot (16MHz 68000-based
Microcontroller "Dragonball"), this would enable Common Lisp in your
pocket, maybe called PalmLispMachine? Interesting thought... ;)
Regs, Pierre.
PS: There already is a nice Scheme Implementation for the PalmPilot,
which needs around 60KB ...
Pierre Mai
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> Rhapsody is dead. MacOS X is the plan de jour. Sigh.
If Espen read it right, it's only the Intel port which has died, which
is still quite sad, IMHO...
> True. But I think there are other markets. Btw., what will happen when
> somebody (DoJ mabe) stops MS? The monopoly of MS is absolutely damaging
> and I'm not going to shovel more money than necessary into
> the pockets of Bill.
Well, at some time in the future, MS will go the same way IBM and
most other monopolies have gone, although I don't expect the DoJ will
have any real impact on this. It is rather the emergence of some new
technology/market that will break MS' neck... Maybe to only leave us
with some new monopolist (like the change-over from IBM => MS).
But with the emergence of more open standards and open source
software, I think the market reign of monopolists might get ever less
oppressive...
> [LispOS]
I think the strategy of first developing a portable, free GUI library
(like the LispOS project does/did with CLIM/clinc) is on the right
track. Once this is in place, many interesting _development_ tools
could be implemented fairly easily and -- more important -- portably.
Another key project might be the reimplementation of the GNU (X)Emacs
kernel in Common Lisp/CLOS based on the above-mentioned GUI library,
with support for extensions in Common Lisp, and a fairly complete
compatibility package for elisp[1], allowing this implementation to
leverage most of the code available for GNU Emacs.
Having these things in place, I think a truely useful development
environment could be built, which might foster the development of
other parts of the system, like integration of a repository (maybe
based on PLOB!, with ideas drawn from ShapeTools[2]), documentation
system (based on SGML?), etc.
Another important key factor might be the ability to integrate other
languages into this development environment, allowing for development
of thin clients in other languages, like the <HYPE>Java</HYPE>.
OTOH I think we might be making[3] the same mistakes that were made
whilst developing the LispMachine environment, so it would be very
interesting to solicit input from those involved in that "project"...
So, enough dreaming already, it's time to get some "real work"(TM)
done...
Regs, Pierre.
Footnotes:
[1] There has already been a project (at MIT, IIRC), that implemented
a sufficient elisp emulation in a Scheme-based Emacs to let GNUS run
unchanged! The author estimated having implemented around 70% of
elisp to achieve this (although this was sometimes around 1994, so
Emacs and the old GNUS was somewhat smaller and simpler).
[2] ShapeTools was an interesting project on the integration of
Revision/Configuration Management and the build process, done here at
the Technical University of Berlin. Especially the Attributed
Filesystem idea would mesh quite well with an OO repository, I think.
See http://swt.cs.tu-berlin.de/~shape/index.html for more info...
[3] making is quite a strong word here, since this is currently just
a "Gedankenexperiment"...
Mike McDonald
In article <m3pvg1j...@torus.cs.tu-berlin.de>,
Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:
> Well, at some time in the future, MS will go the same way IBM and
> most other monopolies have gone, although I don't expect the DoJ will
> have any real impact on this. It is rather the emergence of some new
> technology/market that will break MS' neck... Maybe to only leave us
> with some new monopolist (like the change-over from IBM => MS).
How is the new technology supposed to get developed and entrenched enough
before Bill offers BIG bucks to buy it out? He'd have to be asleep at the
wheel for quite a while for that to happen. (Paying a couple of hundred
million dollars for a startup that hasn't made a buck is cheap insurance to
MS. It'd take a fanatic anti MS guy WITH the "next great thing" to upset MS in
the forseeable future.) IMNSHO, of course.
>> [LispOS]
>
> I think the strategy of first developing a portable, free GUI library
> (like the LispOS project does/did with CLIM/clinc) is on the right
> track. Once this is in place, many interesting _development_ tools
> could be implemented fairly easily and -- more important -- portably.
Everyone has there own idea of what a "portable, free GUI library" should
be. CLIM has some nice properties (presentation types!) while being BIG! I
don't know if there are any viable alternatives though.
(http://www2.cons.org:8000/clim-spec/cover.html)
> Another key project might be the reimplementation of the GNU (X)Emacs
> kernel in Common Lisp/CLOS based on the above-mentioned GUI library,
> with support for extensions in Common Lisp, and a fairly complete
> compatibility package for elisp[1], allowing this implementation to
> leverage most of the code available for GNU Emacs.
I believe this is Erik's project, when he has time. (I've lost his URL. He
posts in c.l.lisp regularly.) I'd think writing a interperter for the Elisp
byte code would be a good first step.
> OTOH I think we might be making[3] the same mistakes that were made
> whilst developing the LispMachine environment, so it would be very
> interesting to solicit input from those involved in that "project"...
As much as I'm a fan of the LispM's, I'm afraid that recreating it won't
mean much to anyone except us old fans. I think there are ideas from the
LispM's that could be recreated and extended that would be of value in today's
world. The tranparent networking comes to mind. Add in support for HTTP and
it'd still be great.
I think the basic problem with the LispM concept in today's world is that
the LispM was based on the idea of a tightly integrated environment whereas
the world has chosen to follow the path of a more loosely coupled style. How
to reconcile those those different approaches is the problem that a "modern
LispM" has to solve.
> So, enough dreaming already, it's time to get some "real work"(TM)
> done...
>
> Regs, Pierre.
Work? Dreaming is a lot more fun!
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Mike McDonald
In article <m3hg1ff...@torus.cs.tu-berlin.de>,
>> Nonetheless, we haven't seen the "huge market" described by some. Can
>> someone convince me that we did, in fact, view the situation correctly
>> and should not instead charge much more money and royalties?
>
> Although I have argued that ACL's price is not that much of a
> problem, I'm equally prepared to try to convince you, that you
> should continue ECL's pricing policy. IMHO there are projects and
> customers who need the features and pricing ECL is offering, and
> ECL _is_ IMHO a very promising[1] product, even for those who
> don't need some of the capabilities ECL is sporting, like e.g. me.
Right. If you change to be just like all of the other Lisp vendors, you'll
be just like all the rest. But then why would someone shose your's over the
existing, well established vendors? Be different!
> I.e. no matter what features you provide, and what pricing policy you
> adopt, there will always be "just another something" that's still
> missing, and if you provide that, too, there will be a whole mass of
> customers of product XYZ who will be jumping up and down to change
> over to your product...
It's the customers job to bitch no matter what! And some are REALLY good at
it!
> Start using Lisp _now_, and don't wait
> for the perfect, ultimate "can-do-everything" tool to appear
> magically. Linux wouldn't exist, if more people had thought this way
> at the beginning, and most other software, too.
That's the key thing. Linux already had a source of apps and tools before it
began. Can someone list all of the CL apps that we just can't live without?
Nope, I didn't think so. But there is a bit of the chicken-and-egg syndrome
involved here. You need enough of the system in place to make writing apps
easy and worth while. But you need apps to justify building the system. Take
my favorite waste of time, CLIM. Just imagine that someday I actually get it
working. So what? Can anyone show me a useful app that I could then run? But
without a working CLIM, it's hard for users to write the "killer" app that
justifies the toolkit. And around and around we go!
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Mike McDonald
In article <joswig-2306...@194.163.195.66>,
jos...@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
> In article <m3btrney...@torus.cs.tu-berlin.de>, Pierre Mai
> <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>> <DREAM>
>> Yes, this is also something I'd like to see, although I'd be weary of
>> another monolithic niche product like the LispMs (which weren't
>> "cheap" either).
> Would you think that a cheap (let's dream of <10k DM/ $6k) Compaq
> machine (64 bit Alpha, say, >=500 Mhz, ...) bundled with
> Symbolics Open Genera 2.0 would be attractive to Lisp developers?
>
> ???
If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
where are you going to get Open Genera?
You still have the delivery problem. Unless you stick to plain CL, in which
case the advantages of Genera are given up. Now, if we had a working version
of Open Genera, maybe some industrious hackers would build compatibility
libraries for generic CL?
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Craig Brozefsky
mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
> where are you going to get Open Genera?
Out of curiosity, why is it called "Open"?
Rainer Joswig
> <DREAM>
> Yes, this is also something I'd like to see, although I'd be weary of
> another monolithic niche product like the LispMs (which weren't
> "cheap" either).
Compaq will offer cheaper Alpha machines with Digital Unix (they
have bought Digital). They recently announced that they will
bring the Alpha to "mass market".
Would you think that a cheap (let's dream of <10k DM/ $6k) Compaq
machine (64 bit Alpha, say, >=500 Mhz, ...) bundled with
Symbolics Open Genera 2.0 would be attractive to Lisp developers?
???
--
http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/
Espen Vestre
jos...@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
> Compaq will offer cheaper Alpha machines with Digital Unix (they
> have bought Digital). They recently announced that they will
> bring the Alpha to "mass market".
Their recent announcement were interpreted (e.g. by http://www.slashdot.org)
as the death announcemnet of Digital Unix :-(
(However, the Titanic movie special effects story has showed that
Alpha with linux is a very interesting platform!)
--
Espen Vestre
Rainer Joswig
Mike McDonald wrote:
> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
> where are you going to get Open Genera?
From Symbolics, I would think.
Then, where do I get Digital Unix? How much would it cost?
> You still have the delivery problem. Unless you stick to plain CL, in which
> case the advantages of Genera are given up. Now, if we had a working version
> of Open Genera, maybe some industrious hackers would build compatibility
> libraries for generic CL?
One company I have heard of calls their thing "Extended Common Lisp".Also, I
wonder what XPORT is: http://www.ascent.com/tools.htm .
Greetings,
Rainer Joswig
Tim Bradshaw
* Zeno wrote:
> Setting distribution fees (royalties, run-time fees, etc.) aside for
> the moment, is it possible to create a small application with Lisp
> which could be distributed over the web? Let's say, you wanted to
> create a small utility which would search the files on Win95/NT
> computers and find duplicates, then provide a list to the user
> allowing them to delete duplicate files as they see fit. Can you do
> this with Lisp? Can you do this with Allegro Common Lisp? Are small
> utilities like these necessarily large programs because of the size of
> Lisp itself?
Yes, typically they are unfortunately. The real problem is that Lisps
don't typically share their runtime support with the OS & other apps
on the system, so it has to be bundled with the program making image
sizes very large. This wouldn't be true if the runtime support was
already on the machine (you could distribute just the code). That's
the case with, for instance, Java & C/C++ stuff where you have oodles
of libraries on the machine already.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw
* Mike McDonald wrote:
> In article <m3pvg1j...@torus.cs.tu-berlin.de>,
> Pierre Mai <de...@cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:
>> Well, at some time in the future, MS will go the same way IBM and
>> most other monopolies have gone, [...]
> How is the new technology supposed to get developed and entrenched
> enough before Bill offers BIG bucks to buy it out? He'd have to be
> asleep at the wheel for quite a while for that to happen. (Paying a
> couple of hundred million dollars for a startup that hasn't made a
> buck is cheap insurance to MS. It'd take a fanatic anti MS guy WITH
> the "next great thing" to upset MS in the forseeable future.)
> IMNSHO, of course.
It's very interesting to look at the IBM position in the late 70s
/ early 80s. There's a book called `Big Blue' written by an economist
who was involved in the anti-trust case against IBM, which describes
(I presume contentiously) IBM's nasty practices. It looked to him
(this is in 198[234]) as if IBM were in a completely dominant position
and would be there for many many years unless they were broken up.
His case looks pretty plausible, except for being totally wrong.
Well, you could look at MS now and see all the same monopolistic
practices, and the same feeble attempts to prevent them crapping all
over the industry, and draw the same conclusions. But they might be
equally wrong. It would be interesting to understand what happened to
IBM and see if you can find analogous mistakes that MS are making.
This is topic drift of the worst kind, I should stop now!
--tim
Rainer Joswig
Tim Bradshaw <t...@aiai.ed.ac.uk> writes:
> Yes, typically they are unfortunately. The real problem is that Lisps
> don't typically share their runtime support with the OS & other apps
> on the system, so it has to be bundled with the program making image
> sizes very large. This wouldn't be true if the runtime support was
> already on the machine (you could distribute just the code). That's
> the case with, for instance, Java & C/C++ stuff where you have oodles
> of libraries on the machine already.
MCL uses shared libraries. You can install them in the extensions folder
in the system. Disk sizes: compiler=448K, library=2.9MB, kernel=168k.
The base development image starts with 1.5MB disk size.
Rainer Joswig
Craig Brozefsky <cr...@onshore.com> writes:
> mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
>
> > able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
> > where are you going to get Open Genera?
>
> Out of curiosity, why is it called "Open"?
Why is "OpenWindows" called "Open"? No seriously, it is a product name.
Open Genera is a virtual Lisp machine, emulates the Ivory
microprocessor and enables you to run the Genera OS and its
software on a DEC Alpha running Digital Unix.
David Hanley
Zeno <ze...@deltanet.com> wrote:
> Setting distribution fees (royalties, run-time fees, etc.) aside for
> the moment, is it possible to create a small application with Lisp
> which could be distributed over the web?
Well, the problem there is the size of the runtime system.
Lisp comes with a lit of library support, and because you client probably
doesn't already have that, they will need to get than along with your
executable.
Of course, this happens with C programs too; just that these
.dll files are often placed there by the manufacturer. I've had
to download huge VBRUN files for windoze apps though...
Let's say, you wanted to
> create a small utility which would search the files on Win95/NT
> computers and find duplicates, then provide a list to the user
> allowing them to delete duplicate files as they see fit. Can you do
> this with Lisp? Can you do this with Allegro Common Lisp?
You could write the program with either of these. Small?
I dunno. Some newer systems allow you to split off the library in a
.dll, so that after the first program, they could receive small
executables.
dave
David Hanley
Mike McDonald <mik...@mikemac.com> wrote:
> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
> where are you going to get Open Genera?
The key question for me is: If I were to write cool lisp apps for
this system, who would my clients be?
I've thought of writing lisp apps for linux in cases where the
clients want a box on the network to do something specific. This is
probably a market that hasa sales in it. but I'm not sure how many.
dave
Mike McDonald
In article <358F5262...@lavielle.com>,
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
>
>
> Mike McDonald wrote:
>
>> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
>> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
>> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
>> where are you going to get Open Genera?
>
From WHO? There is no Symbolics anymore. They got liquidated at the
beginning of the year. It's "assets" were bought by two guys who disappeared
with them.
> Then, where do I get Digital Unix? How much would it cost?
You run Linux instead. Alpha Linux supposedly runs DEC Unix apps.
> One company I have heard of calls their thing "Extended Common Lisp".Also, I
> wonder what XPORT is: http://www.ascent.com/tools.htm .
Hmm. Doesn't seem to say much. I wonder what it really is?
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Rainer Joswig
mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
> In article <358F5262...@lavielle.com>,
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> >
> >
> > Mike McDonald wrote:
> >
> >> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
> >> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
> >> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
> >> where are you going to get Open Genera?
> >
> > From Symbolics, I would think.
>
> From WHO? There is no Symbolics anymore. They got liquidated at the
> beginning of the year. It's "assets" were bought by two guys who disappeared
> with them.
Not really. I was able to send a bug report to someone.
> > Then, where do I get Digital Unix? How much would it cost?
>
> You run Linux instead. Alpha Linux supposedly runs DEC Unix apps.
But Open Genera? I'd be surprised.
Mike McDonald
In article <hg1cnf...@lise.lavielle.com>,
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
>
>> In article <358F5262...@lavielle.com>,
>> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
>> >
>> >
>> > Mike McDonald wrote:
>> >
>> >> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
>> >> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
>> >> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
>> >> where are you going to get Open Genera?
>> >
>> > From Symbolics, I would think.
>>
>> From WHO? There is no Symbolics anymore. They got liquidated at the
>> beginning of the year. It's "assets" were bought by two guys who disappeared
>> with them.
>
> Not really. I was able to send a bug report to someone.
Did you get a response? My understanding was there was one guy left to
handle repairs down in Chatsworth. Anyone know anything more?
>> > Then, where do I get Digital Unix? How much would it cost?
>>
>> You run Linux instead. Alpha Linux supposedly runs DEC Unix apps.
>
> But Open Genera? I'd be surprised.
I don't know anyone who's tried. Linux support for native apps is usually
pretty good. Besides, since you have the source to Linux, one could always fix
it if it didn't. :-)
Wasn't Symbolics charging big bucks for Open Genera anyway? Well, big bucks
as compared to our "dream" anyway.
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Harley Davis
>Mike McDonald <mik...@mikemac.com> wrote:
>
>> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd
has
>> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You
should be
>> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part
is
>> where are you going to get Open Genera?
>
>this system, who would my clients be?
>
> I've thought of writing lisp apps for linux in cases where the
>clients want a box on the network to do something specific. This is
>probably a market that hasa sales in it. but I'm not sure how many.
There seems to be a real market for "network appliances" - machines that do
noe dedicated function that you can just plug into a network and let loose,
with minimal distant browser-based configuration. You can get file servers,
HTTP servers, why not POP3/IMAP servers, etc. No reason not to write one of
these apps in Lisp running on Linux.
-- Harley
Pierre Mai
ze...@deltanet.com (Zeno) writes:
> the moment, is it possible to create a small application with Lisp
> which could be distributed over the web? Let's say, you wanted to
> create a small utility which would search the files on Win95/NT
> computers and find duplicates, then provide a list to the user
> allowing them to delete duplicate files as they see fit. Can you do
> this with Lisp? Can you do this with Allegro Common Lisp? Are small
> utilities like these necessarily large programs because of the size of
> Lisp itself?
I hate repeating myself, but:
1) For very small, _self-contained_ utilities, Common Lisp may simply
not be the right language. On Unix you'd rather either use the
built-in utilites, or perl/scsh. On Windows, this could probably be
hacked-up in Delphi/VB/VC++ in a couple of minutes. Or you could
even use <HYPE>Java</HYPE> and be really portable (OTOH Java also
needs much support-code, but this sometimes happens to be already
installed on some systems).
Another posibility are several Scheme implementations, which are
able to produce small stand-alone images...
Things look very different if you want the utility to work in CL,
as a utility for developers, since then the user already has a CL
environment, and you only distribute the (compiled) files.
2) If you really wanted to distribute smallish applications, then
either ECL[1] or CLiCC[4], which compile to ANSI-C, and IIRC only
link to those functions really needed, might be better choices.
Another option might be clisp.
So this all boils down to using the right tools for the problem: Use
CL where it works best: In medium[3] to large applications that work on
complex data and/or implement complex functionality/logic. CL is
_not_ the language of choice for small, stand-alone applications,
which could even be implemented in perl or VB and still be
maintainable. You wouldn't use C++ with the STL, CORBA, OpenGL and
embedded Tcl for your utility either (other than for demoing purposes,
that is).
BTW: Your questions here are giving me the idea, that you might indeed
be better served with Harlequin's Dylan: Dylan is another member of the
Lisp family of languages, in that it shares a number of it's features,
but Dylan emphasizes more the kind of things you seem to be interested
in. Take a look at Harlequin's site, and the various pages dedicated
to Dylan on the WWW (I imagine Yahoo has a section on Dylan, which
might be a good starting point). See also the newsgroup
comp.lang.dylan, although there is little traffic at the moment.
Regs, Pierre.
Footnotes:
[1] commercial
[2] free (though discontinued, and probably Unix-only)
[3] Here I define medium to be at least around 3k lines of Lisp code,
which would roughly translate to a minimum of 6-10k lines of C++ code.
I know that this is not in line with SE classification of projects,
which label much larger projects medium...
Michael Harper
Hi, at least the support portion of Symbolics is defnitely alive again.
My just renewed our hardware support with them nd I just exchanged a
broken Merlin I/O board this week. Haven't inquired about Genera though.
However, I do know that 8.5 had been ready for shipment earlier this
year right before they went under for a couple of months.
Mike Harper
michael...@alcoa.com
Mike McDonald wrote:
>
> In article <358F5262...@lavielle.com>,
> Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
> >
> >
> > Mike McDonald wrote:
> >
> >> If we're going to dream, let's REALLY dream! Some of the Linux crowd has
> >> claimed that you can get Alpha based motherboards for under $1K. You should be
> >> able to put together a machine for say $2K +/-. Now, the really hard part is
> >> where are you going to get Open Genera?
> >
> > From Symbolics, I would think.
>
> From WHO? There is no Symbolics anymore. They got liquidated at the
> beginning of the year. It's "assets" were bought by two guys who disappeared
> with them.
>
> > Then, where do I get Digital Unix? How much would it cost?
>
> You run Linux instead. Alpha Linux supposedly runs DEC Unix apps.
>
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
| the moment, is it possible to create a small application with Lisp which
| could be distributed over the web?
yes, of course. the question is: what does the recipient need to use it?
for some languages, the user needs to have installed *huge* libraries of
run-time support systems, a *massive* operating system, and have
contributed a lot to Bill Gates's now 50 billion dollar fortune. for
other languages, the user needs to have installed libraries of run-time
support systems, an operating system, and not have contributed to any
top-20 fortune list. that's the difference between VB and Common Lisp,
for instance, and all you can really argue is "but I already have all the
stuff for VB installed". the question is then why you do that instead of
the much more sensible thing, and perhaps why you should stop installing
stuff now, just _before_ you get yourself a Common Lisp environment, too.
| Let's say, you wanted to create a small utility which would search the
| files on Win95/NT computers and find duplicates, then provide a list to
| the user allowing them to delete duplicate files as they see fit. Can
| you do this with Lisp? Can you do this with Allegro Common Lisp? Are
| small utilities like these necessarily large programs because of the size
| of Lisp itself?
yes, of course you can. however, how do you run this utility? with the
VB approach, you basically run the huge run-time system from the command
line or GUI environment and feed it some input that happens to be your
"small utility". with the Common Lisp approach, you basically run the
Common Lisp environment, then invoke the function from the listener.
(sufficiently advanced Lisp listeners are indistinguishable from GUI's.)
Emacs users everywhere run some surprisingly large programs in Emacs and
don't seem to have any craving for an "executable" version of, say, Gnus.
the same applies to other Lisp software. of course, you _can_ run a
separate Emacs that you dumped with Gnus and argue against the size of
the damn thing, but why bother? running Gnus inside your already running
Emacs is _easier_. an that's the issue with Common Lisp, too: it's just
a whole lot easier to have a Common Lisp environment running and then do
all the cool stuff in it than to run whatever other environment your
computer came with and fire up huge run-time systems every time you need
the services of a small utility.
* Pierre Mai
| I hate repeating myself, but:
|
| 1) For very small, _self-contained_ utilities, Common Lisp may simply
| not be the right language.
I disagree profoundly. first, "self-contained" is no longer a valid
concept when used about general purpose computers like PC's or
workstations -- the interdepencies between individual programs and the
operating system environment has been so blurred as to make the choice
between "data for the run-time system" and "executable program" all but
meaningless. second, I run self-contained utilities in Common Lisp all
the time, if I may twist your words a little: I call them "functions".
| On Unix you'd rather either use the built-in utilites, or perl/scsh.
really? if you consider perl and scsh "utilities" to be _small_, just
because they fit in very small source files, I'm afraid that you really
don't see the whole picture. Common Lisp programs are easily shorter
than Perl and Scheme programs, so I would imagine that if you could run
Common Lisp programs with the hash-bang convention, they'd be even
smaller than "very small", since you completely ignore the *enormous*
costs of the Perl and Scheme Shell execution environment.
| Another posibility are several Scheme implementations, which are
| able to produce small stand-alone images...
let me tease you a bit: do you mean images from which you can boot your
computer, like form a floppy disk? that is the truly "stand-alone"
program. dedicated software like Internet routers running on PC's meet
this definition of "stand-alone", and they do exist -- they aren't even
very hard to build -- all it takes is linking in the basic facilities
from a library and asking the linker to write a slightly different file
format that the boot loader recognizes. matter of fact, the whole
operating system meets this definition of "stand-alone". (however, they
aren't _small_, anymore, and frequently need more than one CD-ROM. :)
incidentally, no Scheme implementations I know of can write such images.
| Things look very different if you want the utility to work in CL,
| as a utility for developers, since then the user already has a CL
| environment, and you only distribute the (compiled) files.
but the user _always_ "already has" the prerequisite environment!
this actually reminds me of a user who sued an Internet provider over
here because their marketing line for a "complete" package of software
and hardware for Internet users, "all you need to use the Internet", was
_entirely_ false -- you actually needed a whole _computer_ (and it had to
pledge allegiance to Bill Gates to boot, but that didn't seem to worry
anybody) and only _then_ did you have all you needed.
if you don't have a Common Lisp environment, the question should _not_
be: "how can we make our software available to users without computers?",
but "how do we make them understand that they need a computer _with_ a
Common Lisp environment?"
the problem, then, is only selling them the first Common Lisp application
that needs a Common Lisp environment. once he's got it, it's just
rolling them in!
| So this all boils down to using the right tools for the problem: Use CL
| where it works best: In medium[3] to large applications that work on
| complex data and/or implement complex functionality/logic. CL is _not_
| the language of choice for small, stand-alone applications, which could
| even be implemented in perl or VB and still be maintainable.
wrong! this is _so_ wrong! *cringe* (uncringe, breathe.)
nothing ever _starts_ large except in some extremely specialized areas.
all over the place, you're expected to buy the large starting point and
then make some small application on top of it, then get more funding and
boss approval and peer recognition and all that, and _then_ you let the
thousand cancers grow. Perl is *huge*, VB is even bigger. on top of
these monsters, you can write a small program that does something useful.
Common Lisp is not different in any possible regard, except it makes for
smaller, more elegant, and more playable toys. however, when Perl or VB
code gets bigger than is good for them (a screenful in my opinion, but
people seem to have very large screens these days), two things happen at
once: (1) they realize they should have used a better language, and (2)
they can't use a better language, for several reasons: (a) they don't
know the better language because they have never started using it for
small toys, (b) they don't have the better language available because
they were encouraged to use Perl and VB for "small" applications and
never got any experience with it, (c) they don't have the chutzpah to ask
their boss for the better language that they don't know anything about
because they didn't dare realize that their application would work on
complex data and/or implement complex functionality/logic until just
after they ran out of the chutzpah needed to say Perl or VB (and they)
could handle it, (d) it means scrapping working code, and finally, (e)
because the change to the better language is no longer incremental, like
all the other changes to code they have worked on or written have been.
what happens to a Common Lisp system that grows? with a marginal amount
of nurturing by people who care about elegance, it stays elegant, and it
acquires functionality the same way that the Common Lisp language did: by
careful consideration of the costs of changing one's ways as well as good
design in general functionality where observed necessary. I think a
Common Lisp programmer who is able to think in the terms of Common Lisp
the Standard (i.e, ANSI X3.226) and who is not afraid to write functions
and macros and interfaces that need specification on the same level of
precision as the standard facilities will necessarily write elegant code,
and not end up with a hodge-podge of special-cased crud that fails to
achieve abstraction by it's sheer lop-sided overweightness, which is what
happens to the cancerously growing masses of code in languages that had
all their abstraction done by the language designer and then you just get
to use whatever they left you (C, C++, Perl, VB, etc, etc).
my favorite examples of just this kind of development on top of Common
Lisp are the MOP, the Gray Stream proposal, and logical pathnames (with
which I've spent the last few days struggling...). one could view CLOS
as just such an extension to the first Common Lisp language. their
commonalities are: being well-integrated, solving very hard problems
elegantly through abstraction in the right places, and exposing no
essential differences between "application", "extension", and "language".
properties like this is why I like Common Lisp over languages that make a
tremendous effort to separate the three categories, and I want to write
my code the same way, potentially leaving something of lasting value, not
just some piece of code that "works". what makes this both possible and
impossible, however, is that adding to the Common Lisp heritage is not
for random enthusiasts in the pre-burn-out phase, but for those who are
willing to grok the language (if "grok" is still recognized as a word by
our younger audience -- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate dropped it between
the Ninth and the Tenth Edition -- boo hiss). this takes a lot of time
and effort and is a sometimes humbling experience, but there is also no
shortage of people a lot smarter and more experienced than yourself who
have gone before you. (at least in my experience.) making small steps
in this way in Common Lisp has given me a lot more pleasure than most of
the stuff I have ever been proud of in C or under Unix.
in contrast, just about any newbie can make suggestions for (real and
important) improvements to Perl or C++ and actually get them into the
language! knowing how cool it is to see "my feature" in a large system
like Emacs, it's no wonder that Perl enthuiasts feel the way they do
about their tools, but I contend that they would feel a _lot_ better if
they had not had to invent the mindless kludges that made some trivial
thing marginally easier, but could have used a well-functioning system
from the start and could write some small piece of code that did
something neatly and cleanly that would otherwise be _very_ ugly.
my suggestion is simply: start with small problems, not with large ones.
(and don't start with problems that you think are ideal for Perl or VB --
you'll find that it was the language mindset that defined "ideal", not
the problem itself or indeed _any_ part of its nature.) the goal is to
gain experience, just like you gained experience with Perl or VB: by
doing little things that looked sufficiently fun. don't think for a
minute that "what's cool in Common Lisp is different from what's cool in
Perl or VB", but ask "what's cool in _this language_?" (which is actually
what you should think for any language, or tool, or system, or whatever).
if you start off thinking "how will I solve this Perl problem in Common
Lisp?" you will only find that the Perl mindset is your limitation, and
you will probably blame Lisp, not the least because Larry Wall does.
for your entertainment, a small piece of code that almost completely
hides the annoying habit of at least one operating system to delimit
lines in text files with CRuft instead of just newline characters, and
for the moment ignoring the fact that this problem should have been
solved even more elegantly by the file transfer/sharing software...
;;; administrivia
(defpackage "STREAM-EXAMPLE"
#+allegro
(:use "COMMON-LISP"
"STREAM" ;the Gray stream proposal
"CLOS") ;the Meta-Object Protocol
#-allegro
(:use whatever is appropriate))
(in-package :stream-example)
;;; a typical simple mixin filter class and methods.
(defclass macintosh () ())
(defmethod stream-write-char ((stream macintosh) (character (eql #\newline)))
(call-next-method stream #\return))
(defmethod stream-read-char ((stream macintosh))
(let ((character (call-next-method)))
(if (char= character #\return)
#\newline
character)))
;;; interface function to dynamic stream class creation
(defun push-mixin (mixin stream)
"Push the MIXIN (named by a symbol) on STREAM (a stream object).
Actually, dynamically create, if necessary, a subclass of MIXIN and the
current class of STREAM, and change the class of STREAM to this class."
(let* ((name (concatenate 'string
(symbol-name mixin) "+"
(symbol-name (type-of stream))))
(symbol (intern name #.*package*))
(class (or (find-class symbol nil)
(ensure-class symbol
:direct-superclasses (list mixin (class-of stream))))))
(change-class stream class)))
;; typical usage
(with-open-file (stream "some-file-from-a-mac" :direction :input)
(push-mixin 'macintosh stream)
(read-line stream))
I think this is pretty cool, not the least because I can string together
all sorts of filter functions and mapping tables with mixin classes like
this, bunch up a number of thus created streams in a broadcast stream and
write to a whole bunch of files at once in places in the networked file
system I have relegated to the logical pathname stuff to select for me.
an 8,000-line piece of C code got replaced by 400 lines of Common Lisp in
this fashion. (yes, it's also faster. :)
#:Erik
PS: the other articles that need replying to will be answered shortly.
--
http://www.naggum.no/spam.html is about my spam protection scheme and how
to guarantee that you reach me. in brief: if you reply to a news article
of mine, be sure to include an In-Reply-To or References header with the
message-ID of that message in it. otherwise, you need to read that page.
Larry Hunter
Zeno (ze...@deltanet.com) asked:
Setting distribution fees (royalties, run-time fees, etc.) aside for the
moment, is it possible to create a small application with Lisp which could
be distributed over the web? Let's say, you wanted to create a small
utility which would search the files on Win95/NT computers and find
duplicates, then provide a list to the user allowing them to delete
duplicate files as they see fit. Can you do this with Lisp? Can you do
this with Allegro Common Lisp? Are small utilities like these necessarily
large programs because of the size of Lisp itself?
If you want small lisp deliverables, I would suggest going with a Scheme
implementation, rather than Common Lisp.
I once had to do a project for an important pro bono client that required
both (a) pretty complex semantics-driven pattern matching and (b) had to run
on (even then) ancient 386/DOS machines with 2 or 4MB ram. I really needed
a lisp to have any hope of being able to accomplish the functional goals,
and it needed to be small (and also free). I fairly quickly found
MIT-Scheme (aka CScheme) which fit my needs perfectly. My deliverable was
an "executable" (saved image) which fit on a single floppy, along with an
install script and a README file.
Most Schemes don't have extensive "libraries" built into them as CL does. If
you don't mind the coding work (and style) that comes along with that, then
Scheme is a very nice vehicle for writing and delivering the kind of program
that you are talking about.
Another possibility is to use Common Lisp, but then use a "tree shaker" to
eliminate all of the parts of the image that are unreachable in your final
product. Unfortunately, one needs to adapt coding practices which make the
work of the tree shaker effective, which are sometimes non-obvious. Allegro
comes with a tree shaker, and fairly good documentation on how to code for
it effectively. Personally, I find it easier to start small (Scheme) and
add functionality as I need it, rather than assume the world (CL) and try to
pare it down later.
Larry
--
Lawrence Hunter, PhD.
National Library of Medicine phone: +1 (301) 496-9303
Bldg. 38A, 9th fl, MS-54 fax: +1 (301) 496-0673
Bethesda. MD 20894 USA email: hun...@nlm.nih.gov
Bulent Murtezaoglu
Zeno> [...] I do not, however, understand the
Zeno> hatred of Microsoft/Gates which echoes through your posts
Zeno> consistently. To me, when I purchase something, it is to me
Zeno> as a vote for that product or company, much the same as my
Zeno> one vote contributes to the election of politicians and
Zeno> laws. [...]
The answer to your first sentence is contained in the second. The
general impression is that MS goes a bit beyond being a software house
and they use as much trickery as the market allows to grow. I am not
talking about arguably illegal trickery, but about gratuitous
incompatibilities, constantly changing file formats, stuff line
ms-tnef mime attachments, etc. etc. These things look stupid at first
to people who were not exposed to MS before, and then you get this
eerie feeling that these people are NOT stupid but really know what
they are doing and you don't like what they want to accomplish. So
your "vote" is important. Ordinarily I wouldn't give a damn what
other people use, but now I'm beginning to because what others are
"choosing" to use in multitudes is scaring me some.
Zeno> For instance, in the above paragraph you say that for both
Zeno> something like VB and for Lisp, one needs to have an
Zeno> operating system and libraries which are huge, and that the
Zeno> difference between VB and CL is that if you use CL, you will
Zeno> be contributing to the less successful company and not given
Zeno> money to someone who already has a lot. I assume this is
Zeno> because it is better to help the underdog. But what I am
Zeno> more concerned with is my own bottom line. Selfish?
Zeno> Perhaps, but truthful.
If you are convinced you can do what you need to do with Visual Basic
and CL wouldn't get you any efficiency gains (time wise) and you don't
have to deliver on anything but MS platforms, then why bother with CL
at all? Franz isn't there to compete with Visual Basic or Microsoft,
so I don't understand why you think you should compare them? As far
as their market go I don't think they are the underdog. BTW, if
Microsoft wanted to go into the Lisp business, they'd buy a vendor and
then try to kill the others by seeing to it that their V-Lisp is
somehow more suitable to use on Windows (including the runtime on the
Windows CD just might do that). Hasn't happened yet.
Zeno> [...] You say that *all* that can be argued is that "I already
Zeno> have all the stuff for VB installed". But this is a huge
Zeno> argument, because not only do I already have it, but every
Zeno> business that I go to has it, and they do not want to buy
Zeno> another if the one they have serves their purpose. [...]
Of course, but none of these arguments are technical arguments showing
the superiority of Visual Basic. It might well make business sense to
use it for your application. What people are reacting to is not that
it might make sense for you to use it, but the implication that Lisp
is huge and thus is somehow flawed. At least that's my take on this
thread. The only OS+GUI bundle you need to support comes with
libraries that can [only?] be used by the language the same vendor
sells. That's a good business decision by MS to set things up that
that's the case, it doesn't have anything to do with what common lisp
might be capable of.
[...]
Zeno> I have been told that CL programs can be an icon on the
Zeno> screen, and the user can just click on it to start a program
Zeno> without having to start the correct environment first. If
Zeno> this is true, then to the user, running a Lisp program is
Zeno> the same as a VB program, but not any easier.
How is it supposed to be any easier? Direct commands by the brain?
Zeno> [...] The users I deal with are
Zeno> not even used to starting the word processor to edit a
Zeno> document, they just double-click on the document from
Zeno> whatever program they happen to be in, and the word
Zeno> processor starts.
I've paid my rent and fed myself more than once by dealing with
such users. These are the same folks who call you up because
someone somewhare in their organization has installed Office-mumble
and they can no longer "open" the excel spreadsheets they receive
from that guy. This invariably is "our" problem, because MS is
way too big to call and bitch at ... the guy who's upgraded?...
well he's UPgrading -- can't argue against progress... So yes I think
I know what kind of users you are dealing with, right?
[...]
Zeno> ... They would not understand why I needed them to
Zeno> install an expensive environment on top of Windows in order
Zeno> to run my programs, while my competition does not require
Zeno> this. [...]
Clearly, if people who use Visual Basic are your competition and Franz
will not give you good pricing then they are out of the picture unless
you are convinced common lisp will help you do things that would be
hard to do with VB. My understanding though is that their runtime
royalty is a fraction of _your_ selling price. If you are delivering on
CD, runtime size won't matter, if ACL will make you more productive the
several thousand they charge initially might not matter also. One
would assume that if you are looking for alternatives maybe VB isn't
doing what you want anyway? It depends on the nature of the work and
the numbers involved. ACL is would be a bad investment for writing a
simple directory tree recurser, but maybe they want some fancy
"intranet" thing that could be built on top of cl-http? Or maybe you
heard about companies like viaweb using CL (in their case it clearly
seems to have paid off) and want to do something similar? We don't
know. Maybe you could tell us more? (Or did you already, my
apologies if that's so)
BM
Tim Bradshaw
* Zeno wrote:
> For instance, in the above paragraph you say that for both something
> like VB and for Lisp, one needs to have an operating system and
> libraries which are huge, and that the difference between VB and CL is
> that if you use CL, you will be contributing to the less successful
> company and not given money to someone who already has a lot. I
> assume this is because it is better to help the underdog. But what I
> am more concerned with is my own bottom line. Selfish? Perhaps, but
> truthful.
No, it's because monopolies are *bad* for the free market. I have my
problems with MS SW *as* *software* -- it's generally unreliable &
hard to manage compared to other OS-type products (I'm a system
manager), but I have much worse problems with seeing a monopolist
stifle competition, and MS hold a monopoly on the PC OS market (they
would deny this of course).
Damn, *more* topic drift. I should post articles about Lisp...
--tim
David Thornley
In article <w6k969a...@gromit.nextel.no>,
Espen Vestre <e...@nextel.no> wrote:
>Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> writes:
>
>> Rhapsody is dead. MacOS X is the plan de jour. Sigh.
>
>As I read it, Mac OS X IS Rhapsody 2.0, in fact it has
>all the features of Rhapsody 1.0 plus some more. The only important
>change is that the now very unsure fate of Rhapsody on Intel.
>
If I read the stars correctly (Rigel before Betelgeuse except after
Arcturus?) there is no technical reason that Mac OS X could not be
ported to anything capable of running a Mach kernel, but Apple
is not ready to turn into a software company rather than a hardware
company. Jobs is, after all, the guy who pulled the plug on Mac
clones.
To get a little back on track, it shouldn't be all that difficult to
port current Mac apps to OS X, as a large subset of the current API
is being rewritten to sit on Mach. Assuming that MCL is as class
an act internally as externally, it should not be difficult to run it
on OS X, and then it could theoretically be ported freely.
Y'know, I was never very optimistic about Rhapsody on Intel, and I
was very nervous about Digitool porting MCL to Rhapsody. I think
the OS X thing is a very good idea.
>> Hmm, MCL always has a very small memory footprint (not as small as CLisp,
>> though). A lot of people were starting programming with early MCL
>> versions on early Mac 68k machines with 8 MB RAM.
>
>8MB RAM was a luxury, I developed experimental natural language software
>on a Mac SE (8Mhz 68000) with 2.5MB RAM and (what luxury!) a 16Mhz Mac
>IIX with 5MB RAM. The versions before 1.3 would even run, although
>with tremendous GCing and room only for toy apps, on 1MB machines :-)
>
I take it you didn't use Garnet. :-)
--
David H. Thornley | These opinions are mine. I
da...@thornley.net | do give them freely to those
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | who run too slowly. O-
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
I think this line pretty much sums up your whole line of inquiry, here.
so, why did I hammer on your Microsoft affiliation? I doubt that I could
have gotten you to express the above sentiment in so many words unless I
had hammered real hard on it. I have been doing custom software since
1980 (starting my own business in 1987), and I have _never_ worked under
the Microsoft regime, but I have had ample opportunity to watch it from
the outside and see projects to which I was invited crumble or fail, and
I have watched people blame _everybody_ but the people really to blame:
Microsoft, for their sheer lack of quality products and responsibility
towards their customers. their customers have _always_ believed that
they have been to blame if something failed to work right, and the lies
that Bill Gates personally have served his every partner have likewise
been attributed to his "smartness" and others have just been stupid to
believe him. I saw this pattern _very_ early on, and _that_ is why I
want nothing of their ilk or fandom, and I have acquired an eerie skill
in predicting the few categories Microsoft users can be in. my distinct
impression is that managers who insist on Microsoft products don't want
to _succeed_, they just want to avoid failing in a world they don't
understand, and as long as Microsoft stays afloat, they think they will
stay afloat, too. funny as it may seem, fin-de-siècle syndromes make
managers act weird, too. the Year 2000 problem is little more than the
age-old myth that the end of world coincides with new centuries, and my
guess there are still so many managers who haven't reacted in time is
that they don't actually believe there will be any life on planet earth
in new millennium, anyway, so why waste all the money? think about it.
however, I must admit that you surprised me a bit today, and that's quite
a feat for a hardened cynic like myself. I didn't know it was _possible_
for anybody to be so arrogant and so stupid at the same time as to
express the above sentiment towards a "competing" product or solution,
and so utterly lacking in understanding of basic economics. sorry to be
harsh, but you need to snap out of your dream and _listen_, not just to
the stuff you are prepared to listen to, but to the underlying arguments.
when you pay for something, there is a tacit assumption that you somehow
value whatever you pay for higher than the money you part with, and an
explicit assumption that whoever parts with the goods values your money
higher than the goods he parts with. the explicit assumption is well
known and nobody argues its validity. the tacit assumption is what makes
the price he charges possible in his market, and the science of marketing
and market management is founded in psychology so murky that you would
prefer it to be unknown to you as a customer, but you _need_ to know.
these tacit assumption need to be made explicit in order to change the
direction and focus of a market, and that's where Microsoft's marketing
is at its very best: they address your belief system, not their own
products. this is especially important for people who don't realize that
these assumptions are there to begin with, and that includes you, "Zeno".
a few people, yours truly among them, argue in various fora that kids
should be exposed to psychology from kindergarten up to withstand the
mind-wiping techniques of twenty-first century marketing, and although
this sounds paranoid to people who know nothing about marketing, those
who do and who know how the mass media work have been trying to alert the
sleeping masses for many decades. I'm trying to alert you now. it will
fail with a 98% probability (a statistical fact), because your belief
system is so constructed as to block any suggestion that those beliefs
are manufactured by others and not your own. the consensus among your
peers, upon which you base your judgments, is not your own, it has been
deliberately manufactured by those who benefit from it, from politicans
to businesses via religious leaders and news anchors. however, it is
_not_ a conspiracy, it is _not_ an evil plot to subdue the masses (as if
they weren't to begin with!), and it is _not_ a take-over plot by aliens
visiting earth, so listen up. this is the _natural_ development of mass
media at work in huge societies, and it could not have become otherwise;
the only way _not_ to get where we are would have been to destroy the
onset of mass communication, which would never have been tolerated by the
same masses that are controlled by it today, in exactly the same way that
tobacco and the automobile would have been prohibited immediately had
they been proposed today, together with their attendant costs and loss of
human lives, but cannot be removed from society today.
the tacit assumption at work in your world is that a development system
has a _fixed_ upper limit to its value to developers and that leads to
the sentiment that you are willing to pay anything _below_ that upper
limit, but that you would not feel you would get your money's worth if
you paid more -- you would, in your own judgment, be better off keeping
your money and being without that development environment. put even more
strongly, albeit less certain, a development system has a fixed _value_
in your judgment: you know what you can get out of the development
environment you use today, and you cannot imagine, nor will you listen to
testimonials, that it is possible to be an order of magnitude more
productive in another, nor will you consider slightly different modes of
operation that would make your development environment look like the
cheap plastic toy it is to many other people. the result of your tacit
assumptions is that it would not be possible to sell you anything more
_valuable_ than your current development environment. thus you see the
world as fundamentally limited, and to you, it _would_ be helping some
underdog who overcharges for his products, not because they do, but
because _you_ are unable to see the extra value they charge for, and
which _others_ accept as worth more than the money they part with.
the key question when it comes to your Microsoft affiliation, if not
marriage, is that you have "let" Microsoft implant in you the upper value
of the goods that its _competitors_ could sell you, but not the price of
their own products. the _problem_ is that you have not _let_ this happen
to you in any conscious way, of course -- it has been shaped by the
extremely talented and equally manipulative people at Microsoft who have
successfully set the entire agenda for the PC industry trade rags and
(almost) all of their journalists. in particular, the history of the
quite fantastic marketing of the vaporware "Windows" product is worth
studying for decades to come. how _could_ a fraudulent little fart in
Seattle manage to con the whole software world into believing he would
release a product and then not do it, over and over and over? why did
_anyone_ believe him?
to the people who are aware of the assumptions that are tacit among the
sleeping masses, it is no wonder at all that Microsoft succeeds: Bill
Gates is very good at playing the right lullabies at the right time so
people who wake up and smell the coffee (a blistering asphalt by now),
they are calmed down and go back to sleep for another marketing cycle.
those who are unable to understand or appreciate the dire consequences of
tacit assumptions that go completely unchallenged, appear to the sleeping
masses as if they are on cocaine or paranoid or think they are sleepless
over Seattle. Microsoft is so good at turning off the alarm clock that
it has become impossible to be concerned about their business ethics
without being associated with something the tacit assumptions elsewhere
say is "impossible" or "impractical" or "insane", like high quality
software, communism, or anti-innovation.
| One of my concerns was with the price of Lisp development compared to VB.
precisely, and you are not at all concerned with its _value_ to you,
because the tacit assumption in your world is that you _know_ the value
of any and all development environments, you _know_ all it takes to use
one productively, you _know_ how much you can squeeze out of it, and you
know _exactly_ what you want out of it, too. those tacit assumptions are
so tacit as to be engraved on your MS Vertebra 8.0. nothing could change
your ways, your means of doing business, or your customer base. that you
and millions of other developers think this way is how Microsoft benefits
tremendously from your solidifying your tacit assumptions by being an
arrogant tourist in Common Lisp-land. when Microsoft says "jump", you
rush to compute the optimal height and go for it. when Microsoft falls,
you fall. then, when Microsoft doesn't get up, you will _not_ blame Bill
Gates for it like you should but never did in the past, either, you will
_not_ blame yourself for being so unfuckingbelievably gullible as to buy
his crap and let your own mind turn to mush with their tacit assumptions.
but you _will_ retain all the tacit assumptions that brought you down
intact and you _will_ blame the Department of Justice for "meddling" with
"internal affairs" and you _will_ continue to think that everybody who
doesn't like Microsoft's business practices must also _hate_ them and at
least be _somewhat_ irrational, if not completely gaga. however, _I_
have seen people go nuts over the fact that I refuse to work under the
Microsoft regime and effectively boycott them (although it never gets to
that in practice), as if the fact that I _dare_ to confront them puts
their own belief system in jeopardy and they need to defend themselves
from the living proof that you _don't_ die instantly if you don't believe
in Bill Gates' rhetoric, which it seems is what they actually fear.
_such_ is the set of tacit assumptions that defines the upper limit to
the price of a development system in your world, and _this_ is why you
are not going to become a Franz Inc customer, nor a Common Lisp user, nor
_ever_ understand why some people think Franz Inc's pricing policy for
the Microsoft world is _dangerously low_. you see, to some people,
charging 40% less for a lot more software to people who have already
bought into the tacit assumptions emanating from Seattle is caving in to
the price spiral and the "nah, it cannot _possibly_ be worth that much
money"-attitude that you have so well exposed to us. does the Lisp world
_need_ people who only consider the price and not value-for-money? no.
does the Lisp world _need_ to become ephemeralized the way the Microsoft
world is, where nothing ever lasts till next year? no. a product that
bears a publication date of May 1996 is _not_ out of date in the Lisp
world -- but it would be ancient history to Microsoftians because their
world doesn't really exist except as figments of marketing, and you can't
repeat a marketing lie just any number of times, it _has_ to be upgraded,
or you will stop believing it, you will see your tacit assumptions and
you will question Microsoft, lose your belief system, and die instantly.
finally, the reason I'm valuable to my clients and the reason I can do
all the fun stuff I do is that I'm not afraid to challenge _any_ tacit
assumption or to seek answers to the questions people don't want me or
anybody else to ask, neither of themselves nor of their peers. only that
way can I figure out what people _really_ think and want (and do), and
most of the time, it comes down to much less expensive systems and
solutions than they were brought up by the big consulting firms and
Microsoft to believe it would cost. the tacit assumption I sometimes
find it hard to overcome is "nah, it cannot _possibly_ be accomplished
with that little money or that few people", but this can sometimes be
fixed just by charging more money for it...
#:Erik
Peter.VanEynde
Mike McDonald <mik...@mikemac.com> wrote:
...
:>> > Then, where do I get Digital Unix? How much would it cost?
:>>
:>> You run Linux instead. Alpha Linux supposedly runs DEC Unix apps.
:>
:> But Open Genera? I'd be surprised.
: I don't know anyone who's tried. Linux support for native apps is usually
: pretty good. Besides, since you have the source to Linux, one could always fix
: it if it didn't. :-)
In the paper describing the lispm-emulator on Alpha they mention that
the emulated lispm is like a machine on the net. It all looks a lot like
using the mach-features of OSF, is this is true Linux won't be
able to run Open Genera. (The tell-tale signs of mach-calls are
negative system-call numbers it seems)
I just hope it isn't true, Open Genera on a 21264 could be fun :-).
Groetjes, Peter
--
It's logic Jim, but not as we know it. http://hipe.uia.ac.be/~s950045
Look in keyservers for PGP key.
Sashank Varma
In article <31077758...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> wrote:
[snip!]
> * Zeno the Anonymous Poster
> | One of my concerns was with the price of Lisp development compared to VB.
>
> precisely, and you are not at all concerned with its _value_ to you,
[snip!]
A modern version of Perlis' quip that Lisp programmers know the
value of everything but the cost of nothing. :)
Sashank (fellow Common Lisp programmer)
Kenneth P. Turvey
On 24 Jun 1998 10:38:39 -0400, Larry Hunter <hun...@nlm.nih.gov> wrote:
[Snip]
>
>Another possibility is to use Common Lisp, but then use a "tree shaker" to
>eliminate all of the parts of the image that are unreachable in your final
>product.
Are there any freely available "tree-shakers"?
Thanks,
--
Kenneth P. Turvey <ktu...@pug1.SprocketShop.com>
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
-- Henry Kissinger
Rainer Joswig
thor...@visi.com (David Thornley) writes:
> To get a little back on track, it shouldn't be all that difficult to
> port current Mac apps to OS X, as a large subset of the current API
> is being rewritten to sit on Mach. Assuming that MCL is as class
> an act internally as externally, it should not be difficult to run it
> on OS X, and then it could theoretically be ported freely.
This is a very interesting idea.
> Y'know, I was never very optimistic about Rhapsody on Intel, and I
> was very nervous about Digitool porting MCL to Rhapsody. I think
> the OS X thing is a very good idea.
For MCL this is a good news. The interfaces are not changing that much.
Porting seems to be possible. Remaining difficulties would be
to support integration into a foreign platform and to write
a new compiler backend. Dependency on assembler has been reduced
since the PowerPC port a lot.
For Rhapsody a Unix-based Lisp (like ACL which was already running on NeXT)
would have had advantages. (NeXToids are already complaining that Mac OS X
isn't NeXT like; different UI, no DPS, ...).
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
| monopolies, and I wondered why answers to questions about Lisp in this
| group have more space dedicated to the evil empire of Microsoft than
| about the benefits of using Lisp.
in brief, because you have let Microsoft define the value to you of any
development system that you could ever want to purchase (and thus the
price you would be willing to pay for "a development system", regardless
of what value it would or could offer you), and because you parade this
microsoftization of your value system before others all the time by
incessantly comparing with Visual Basic.
#:Erik
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
| consistent forever. I want innovation to continue, and the best that can
| be done is to give the new program the ability to save in the old format,
| can you see a better way?
yes, I can, and so can everybody else who has ever defined data formats
and communication protocols. again, this is not about Microsoft, but
about how you have let your entire intellectual capacity be reduced to
whatever Microsoft lets you imagine. why would technology halt because
file formats remained consistent? this is a given in _your_ world, but
it is a falsehood everywhere else. it is mind-boggling that you believe
this crap. you _must_ break loose from and look beyond the propaganda.
first, gratuitous incompatibilities with the past is _not_ evidence of
innovation, but proof of rampant stupidity and technical inferiority. if
it is perpetrated on purpose, which it is by Microsoft, it is also evil.
when the concept of innovation is expressed through incompatibilities,
which it is by Microsoft, we're talking about conceptual pollution much
more advanced than George Owell's Newspeak. when customers believe this
crap, we're talking about successful marketing and business smarts and
billions of dollars going into the wrong hands. it's all tied together
like this, and it's somewhat disconcerting that a Microsoft victim is so
dead set on defending the company and never listen. Microsoft is really
good at the propaganda game.
second, designing a forward-compatible data format or communications
protocol is trivial (except for people who think it's macho to be
complex). those who do not base their entire business on the hope and
expectations that all their users will upgrade, have no problem applying
the decade-old knowledge and experience that tells them that it is
fantastically stupid _not_ to use forward-compatible techniques when they
are so well known throughout the entire industry, _except_ for Microsoft,
and apparently their believers.
for the archetypical example of forward-compatible formats, consider the
header-value pairs used in Internet mail. the semantics of certain
headers were defined in RFC 822 and a pattern to header names was defined
never to obtain standard semantics (X-headers). that's the extent of the
core definition. this format was _explicitly_ forward-compatible, in
that new RFCs were supposed to add headers according to application
needs, as they indeed have.
if you need an elaborate example of what a data format would be like if
people were concerned about standardizing syntax and not semantics, take
a look at the Standard Generalized Markup Language, the foundation of the
hugely successful and at least somewhat forward-compatible "HTML". SGML
is basically a meta-language for other languages, but while it is clouded
in a _lot_ of problems because of its inexperienced designers at the time
it got its core definition hammered out (early 1970's), it has some
rather unique and interesting properties with respect to forward- and
backward-compatibility. it would take too long to explain them here, but
consider the HyperText Markup Language. HTML made the same mistake by
accident that Microsoft does on purpose: they defined the behavior of
future additions to be intrusive on the past. in particular, an unknown
element in HTML _always_ causes its contents to be treated as if the
element's boundary syntax ("tags" to the public) were absent. this is
_really_ stupid. the smart choice would be to have standardized on a
property, perhaps syntactic, which defined whether an element should
display or should be skipped. it doesn't take a genius to think up these
things, but it does require people who haven't been brain-washed to think
in terms that _exclude_ such ways. so, surprisingly, Microsoft's RTF
does exactly that. one is left to wonder how that can be when they argue
so strongly that data formats _must_ change for them to "innovate".
don't you think it's time to get off your Microsoft horse and stop saying
things like "the best that can be done" when you clearly lack the theory
and the practical experience to even be _able_ to say those words? not
only does it _offend_ some people to see monumentally stupid ways to do
things being paraded as "the best that can be done", it indicates that
you are not prepared to listen, you are not coming to a new world with a
desire to learn, but you are (in effect) coming to a new world to defend
your old world and your old ways. if you hear arguments intended to make
you realize that your old world is mostly bogus, it is because you make a
point out of telling people it's great when they know that it isn't.
what started as small stabs at somebody's even then apparent marriage to
Visual Basic, actually went to prove that that person would be defending
his Microsoft ways, not because they are better, but because he wouldn't
_let_ anything better than them _exist_, and would even be upset that
anybody could charge a lot more money for a kind of product that he
thought he already knew everything about and which would compete with
"the best that could be done", because surely, _nothing_ can ever exceed
Microsoft's work in technical excellence. right? (wrong!)
as long as people say Microsoft's mass-marketed crapware is technically
superior or even quality products, they _will_ be beat over the head with
huge sticks by those who know better, and they are becoming more and more
numerous because it is impossible to keep a whole nation subdued with
propaganda _all_ the time. operating systems that actually manage to
keep their data formats compatible and consistent for decades have begun
to destroy the belief systems of die-hard Microsoftians everywhere.
BTW, Lisp's syntax and data formats have remained consistent for several
decades. nobody needed to define a new and incompatible _syntax_ just
because they issued a new definition of the _language_. this is what
happens when good people think. gratuitous incompatibilities is what
happens when stupid people don't think or bad people think too much.
#:Erik
Erik Naggum
* Zeno the Anonymous Poster
| express the sentiments I did.
no, that's not what I said, and that's not what I did. I'm beginning to
realize it's a fucking waste of time to write anything to you at all, but
please, in the interest of understanding what I _have_ said, realize the
difference between observing an unexpected result that could not have
happened without a specific antecedent which had its own purpose and
causes, and an action intended to cause the exact same result. just
because you see the result doesn't mean it had to come from the set of
causes your failing brain imagines. this is _extremely_ elementary.
please also refrain from rewriting what other people say and making
stupid summaries of what you fail so utterly to understand. it may be
entertainment to you, just as it is _expected_ of people who have to
defend their very core beliefs, but can't and won't, always find cause to
laugh or find themselves "entertained", but that doesn't mean it wasn't
an attempt to reach a working brain at least somewhat open for new views
(which failed, with the 98% expected probability, which you went on to
prove, for reasons I do not understand -- usually people pull themselves
together and try real hard to be in the select crowd that "gets" an idea
in the face of such statistics -- perhaps the ideas were just to much for
your brain to handle all at once and you _had_ to assume it wasn't real).
| I would have to think extremely hard, and have the help of some mushrooms
| to understand that managers are buying Microsoft products because there
| will be no life on planet earth in a short few years.
excuse me? whoever _wrote_ this insane bullshit but _yourself_? does
your brain work, not by thinking, integrating, and analyzing ideas, but
by juxtaposing random sentences and declaring yourself "entertained" by
results like the above? does your brain run Visual Basic?
| Yes, you certainly do have the most open, inquisitive mind I have ever
| encountered. Not set in your ways, you're not--oh, no.
thank you for the final proof of the upper limit to your capabilities.
it saves me a lot of time and effort to know that I would have been
dealing with someone whose ability to accept information and ideas
contrary to his tacit assumptions is _exactly_ zero.
Martin Rodgers
In article <31079139...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> * Zeno the Anonymous Poster
> | Agreed. Monopolies are bad. But I have no interest in breaking up any
> | monopolies, and I wondered why answers to questions about Lisp in this
> | group have more space dedicated to the evil empire of Microsoft than
> | about the benefits of using Lisp.
>
> in brief, because you have let Microsoft define the value to you of any
> development system that you could ever want to purchase (and thus the
> price you would be willing to pay for "a development system", regardless
> of what value it would or could offer you), and because you parade this
> microsoftization of your value system before others all the time by
> incessantly comparing with Visual Basic.
I'm working of ridding the world of Microsoft. I'll start by
assassinating Bill Gates, and then try to obtain a tactical nuke so I can
take out Seatle.
That just leaves all the people who helped make MS what they are today,
i.e. the people who bought their software. My personal believe - please
correct me if I'm wrong - is that the demands of the free market have
made MS into the competitive monster that it is. Just like every other
corporation. So, more tactical nukes will be needed.
My efforts to provoke conflict between Indian and Pakistan have failed,
thanks to another corporate outfit called the United Nations. So, first
Seatle, then New York...
The risk is that the market will attempt to put replace MS with another
company (Apple? Sun? SGI?) and turn it into yet another monster. I cite
as evidence all the previous tycoons who've testified before a senate
committee this century. The only difference is that this time it's the
computer industry, instead of oil, steel, rail, etc.
I'm unwilling to let anyone define what I value. Alas, money talks. Only
guns (and nukes) speak louder...And that's still money talking. This is
_not_ about Lisp. It's way bigger than that! The problem is so bad that
most people will think you're mad if you question the desire to make
money. My alternately plan is to just wait until a year and half, and
then ask people how much they think software can hurt them. I don't want
a body count (but we'll probably get one anyway), but number with a lot
of zeros will help wake up the bean counters.
Perhaps I won't actually need any nukes...Money talks.
Followups adjusted.
--
Please note: my email address is munged; You can never browse enough
"Ahh, aren't they cute" -- Anne Diamond describing drowning dolphins
Bulent Murtezaoglu
[I have to edit this some sorry if I lose some relevant content]
[my response deleted]
Zeno> You snipped the end.
My apologies. My point didn't concern what I snipped IMHO (but IMHO
of course!), anyhow...
[...]
Zeno> Is
Zeno> there a reason why no one says that Lisp programs can be
Zeno> developed more efficiently than with VB, or that Lisp
Zeno> programs are more portable than C programs? [...]
Can't speak for anyone else. My only exposure to VB is through
VB for apps. that I needed to use for some instrumentation stuff
that needed to plug into Excel and some minor guidance I gave one of
our student techs. I didn't like it, but then I never liked basic
anyway. I didn't particularly care for the environmant either -- but
that's mainly cultural -- I'm used to X, emacs, etc. I start getting
red the first time windows grabs my keyboard focus... So I cannot tell
you what the contrast is with Basic. The vague _similarity_ could be
having a listener at hand while developing, and the ability to
call individual functions to test them etc. Your best bet is to get
Norvig's, and Graham's books and try to do what they are doing there
in Basic and then look at their solutions. If the things like
elegance, succint expression of ideas, etc. jump from the page,
you're all set!
(You mention prolog and AI below, that's why I suggest Norvig's book.
Paradigms of AI programming in Common Lisp is the name I believe).
[...]
Zeno> The last part of your paragraph brings up a question that I
Zeno> have been wondering about. If Microsoft had a version of
Zeno> Common Lisp, it would necessarily provide hooks into the OS,
Zeno> and make use of their proprietary ActiveX/Com technology.
[...]
Depends on how they do it. People (your buddy Erik included) tend to
get harsh and tight about non-ANSI-ness sometimes. If they build all the
stuff in and claim that they are part of Common Lisp, then people might
make noises.
[...]
Zeno> I do not understand what you mean when you say that the
Zeno> libraries provided for VB/VC++ can only be used with
Zeno> Microsoft languages. I use a lot of ActiveX and DLL
Zeno> components, and they're almost all written by firms other
Zeno> than MS. These components can be called from any language
Zeno> which supports them, and from what I understand, the newest
Zeno> version of Allegro Common Lisp can use them. [...]
Ah, might be my mistake. I assumed vbrun.dll etc were VB specific.
[on my whining about people to whom I send bills sometimes...]
Zeno> It's far worse than that at times, which I'm sure you know.
Zeno> As far as installing Office-mumble, all the "upgraded" user
Zeno> has to do is save the file in the previous version. They
Zeno> often don't want to because they may lose something in the
Zeno> translation, such as their dancing graph or font which
Zeno> flashes like a billboard.
No they don't do that because they don't want to go into the additional
truble of selecting the same thing from a menu over and over again and be
greeted with a warning message that tells them they would be missing
"advanced" features when nobody really knows what those are.
Zeno> But I do not want technology to
Zeno> halt because file formats should remain consistent forever.
Zeno> I want innovation to continue, and the best that can be done
Zeno> is to give the new program the ability to save in the old
Zeno> format, can you see a better way?
This ain't innovation, this is an under-handed way to get people
to upgrade. Fer cryin' out loud, how many of your clients _need_
anything beyond Office 4.3 or 95? What are these innovations anyway?
And why do our clients need to spend hundreds of dollars a pop to
get them? Is it the patronizing little digital paperclip?
But I digress...
Yes there can be a better way, if one's willing to look for it.
HTML changes all the time, for example, and practicaly nobody suffers
because their browser cannot understand some new tag. Anyhow,
MS can do these things because the market lets them. Erik is right,
innovation is no longer a useful word in this context.
[...]
Zeno> I am putting together a website which uses a large database.
Zeno> This site must access the data fast, display forms and
Zeno> graphical data quickly, and learn from experience.
What kind of connectivity do the clients have? How many?
Zeno> It must
Zeno> be flexible enough that as the web interface change over
Zeno> time, and as the amount of data grows and the data server is
Zeno> changed, the main-program/rules-engine should not become
Zeno> obsolete or overloaded and have to be rewritten.
I doubt either problem will happen _because of_ Lisp. It is
inevitable that things will get re-written as you learn more about the
problem you are solving. Lisp is very suitable for projects like this
because (and as Graham illustrates in his macro book) you have the
ability to write in Lisp a language that is suitable for your problem.
You then solve your problem in that language. As for efficiency when
you do know more about your program ask around for experiences. Folks
here are very helpful for stuff like that. Sometimes inner loops get
optimized in a group effort!
Zeno> I was
Zeno> looking to see if I should stick with the languages I
Zeno> currently use with some intelligence and adaptability added
Zeno> by calling Prolog, or if I should write the whole thing in
Zeno> Lisp. I am still not sure about Lisp for this since I saw
Zeno> one post which said web-objects (?) were priced at $15,000,
Zeno> but may have come down since then. I have the expense of
Zeno> research, sales, programming, hardware, and communications
Zeno> (and that's trimming it down).
Not knowing the figures, I cannot help you with the money part, but I
can tell you it doesn't take $6k to see if you can do what you want
in Common Lisp. Here's what I can see:
(1) I don't see why you're tied to Microsoft at all for this. They
hardly have the best of anything you need for this project. You'll
need a database engine of sorts, and a web server. Neither SQL server
nor IIS are that great. You can use them probably but you don't have to.
Since your UI is what the browser will display, you don't need to have
access to windows API or anything like that. All this is good, because
you have a choice and don't need to wait for things to appear on NT.
(2) I understand the AI-ish part of the project is yet to be developed.
You don't need an $6k system to start trying out ideas. Franz does have
a Free CL for Windows, which might be OK for small programs (the editor
in the IDE chokes on big files). Or you might bite the bullet and see
if you can develop under Unix. A decent headless Linux box with
very respectable power would cost you less than $1k; grab ACL for Linux and
their fi interface, run an X-server on your NT machine and you're in
business. ACL for Linux is identical (as far as the Common Lisp part goes)
to ACL for other Unices and Windows. If you don't get discouraged at
the beginning, you might find the development environment and emacs
very useful also.
The above scheme costs nothing other than time (hardware can
move very quickly when clients hear 15%-off as you may know).
[...]
Zeno> The website would also allow users to download smallish
Zeno> utilities to run on their own computers which would help
Zeno> them use the website. Since a different version of each
Zeno> program would be necessary for each type of operating
Zeno> system, I was looking to see if Lisp would provide me with
Zeno> the necessary portability, and if libraries were then
Zeno> available for each OS so that the program could run in
Zeno> different environments with (almost) the same code. The
Zeno> utilities will necessarily be sophisticated, as they would
Zeno> be very graphically oriented (just the nature of the beast).
It looks like you'll need Java or something that compiles to JVM code
for the client end.
Zeno> At this point, I have no idea if Lisp is suited to the task,
Zeno> or whether the costs of using it for this would be
Zeno> astronomical. [...]
It wouldn't be. You can explore the ways of writing the guts of this
thing using Lisp for free. The UI stuff will have to come later if I
understand you correctly. Actually, you can have the entire thing
running with free software if you use CMUCL, a free Unix and apache
(ACL for Linux is not free if you're making money off it).
If you go that route you'll also find that you get away with not
installing keyboards and mice and video cards in servers (I suppose
that is an innovation), and that you can admin this thing remotely
(another innovation) and that you don't need to reload the OS to
change certain simple things (big innovation, really revolutionary) and
that it doesn't crash or leak memory as often (oh boy, that's the next
generation). Sorry couldn't resist.
cheers,
BM
Erik Naggum
* Martin Rodgers
| The problem is so bad that most people will think you're mad if you
| question the desire to make money.
if you can't understand, then just _memorize_ that that's not the issue
at all, you perennial dimwit.
#:Erik
Martin Rodgers
In article <31079462...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> * Martin Rodgers
> | The problem is so bad that most people will think you're mad if you
> | question the desire to make money.
>
> if you can't understand, then just _memorize_ that that's not the issue
> at all, you perennial dimwit.
Have you anything better to offer than bile?
--
Please note: my email address is munged; You can never browse enough
Not coming to you from Glastonbury
Daniel R Barlow
In article <3596eb29...@news.deltanet.com>,
Zeno <ze...@deltanet.com> wrote:
>On 25 Jun 1998 15:03:32 +0000, Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> wrote:
>> it has become impossible to be concerned about their business ethics
>> without being associated with something the tacit assumptions elsewhere
>> say is "impossible" or "impractical" or "insane", like high quality
>> software, communism, or anti-innovation.
>
>endeavors does lend more insight to your hatred of one man for making
>so much more than the others, and to your rejection of new technology.
Erik is concerned about Microsoft's business ethics. Zeno has just
associated Erik with high quality software, communism and anti-innovation.
This hasn't proved Erik's assertion, but it's certainly consistent with it.
-dan
Martin Rodgers
In article <6n38st$1...@fishy.ox.compsoc.net>, d...@fishy.ox.compsoc.net
says...
> Erik is concerned about Microsoft's business ethics. Zeno has just
> associated Erik with high quality software, communism and anti-innovation.
>
> This hasn't proved Erik's assertion, but it's certainly consistent with it.
There are also people who call Richard Stallman a communist. I guess some
ideas are hard for some people to understand.
I've heard exactly the same kind of misunderstandings made on a radio
phone-in show, simply because the presenter has some creative ideas. To
many, they're also provocative ideas.
Now, business is a very different world to talk radio, which here in the
UK is considerably more gentle. Why then are people so hostile to new
ideas? Perhaps any suggestion of change is seen as provocative? Could
that explain why people "redmist", and hear a totally different idea?
For example, mistaking the freedom to use GPL'd software as communism?
Like Erik, I too question Microsoft's business ethics. I also question
the policies of my country's government, as do a lot of other people.
How do we "vote" for better business ethics without sounding like
socialists? (A very real problem here in the UK.)
I think we're preaching to the converted - apart from Zeno, that is.
Erik Naggum
* Martin Rodgers
| Have you anything better to offer than bile?
what you do think you deserve? you change the subject to "free market
bashing" as if anyone but you had a problem with the free market and you
direct followups to alt.fan.bill-gates and comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,
as if anyone but you would like to post to such moronic newsgroups.
why do you whine every time you get what you deserve but never learn to
do something different? you don't _have_ to post stupid drivel, do you?
#:Erik
Erik Naggum
* Martin Rodgers
| How do we "vote" for better business ethics without sounding like
| socialists?
you buy from somebody else. just how hard can it be to grasp this?
Hartmann Schaffer
Zeno wrote:
> ...
> > managers act weird, too. the Year 2000 problem is little more than the
> > age-old myth that the end of world coincides with new centuries, and my
> > guess there are still so many managers who haven't reacted in time is
> > that they don't actually believe there will be any life on planet earth
> > in new millennium, anyway, so why waste all the money? think about it.
>
> message like this. I found this to be one of the most entertaining
> messages I have ever read. Surely though, it would have been more
> entertaining had it not been at my expense.
Since you are new in this group: here is a word of advice: pay close
attention to what technical advice Erik gives, and filter out the way he
delivers his message if you don't like it. You'll benefit from the
former.
> I would have to think extremely hard, and have the help of some
> mushrooms to understand that managers are buying Microsoft products
> because there will be no life on planet earth in a short few years. I
> would have to think equally hard to understand how all of these people
> with these crumbling projects could blame themselves and everyone but
> Microsoft for the problem, with you being the only one who can see the
> truth of the ugly world-takover of Microsoft. It's a company.
> Nothing more, nothing less.
I would have put it slightly differen: MS has taken over the role that
IBM had in the 70s and early to mid 80s: you can't (or couldn't} be
blamed / fired for buying their products, even though better, more cost
effective products are available. Both companies do | did their best to
exploit this mindset.
> ...
> It would be absolutely ludicrous for either of us to say that we have
> not been molded by our environments, but you seem to think that your
> environment has not affected you. Mass media is not a fad, and
> neither is the automobile. Your solution of nipping these things in
> the bud to save mankind is quite far-fetched to say the least. I
> assume you don't supply Internet connectivity to your customers, or do
> you allow yourself to get sucked into the communication vortex just a
> little bit, when you cannot show your customers what fools they are to
> want to communicate with the rest of the world?
If I understand the above remark correctly, you are saying that you need
MS products to connect to the Internet. Nothing would be further from
the truth.
> ...
> What I have been after is one or two of the testimonials you speak of.
> I am perfectly willing to listen to them, but instead of testimonials
> to the glory of CL, all I hear is why MS is bad. You are absolutely
CL is a language, VB a combination of language with development
environment with presentation environment, MS a company. Right now we
are into comparing apples with oranges with cherries.
As far as the reasons why I think CL (and other LISP like languages) are
superior to (the language component of) VB: much better at letting you
form your own abstractions, much better cod structuring, the run time
system takes care of memory management, very easy (for me) syntax.
Unless your approach to problem structuring isn't hopelessly stuck in a
mindset formed by one language, you'll most likely will (perhaps after
some learning period) produce more reliable code much faster, probably
considerably more reliable. The only one who can answer this for you is
yourself: get hold of some Lisp implementation, play around with it,
see how you take to it. If you never used anything similar, get a good
introductory text to guide you in your experimentation. Best check the
FAQ (it gets posted to this newsgroup regularly) about available
implementations and recommended books. If most of your work involves
GUI: you'll have to settle for one implmentation. Most free Lisps
require some work to integrate some of the available GUIs; and I don't
have the faintest idea what is available inder Win32. The FAQ probably
will help, and I suspect that all the commercial implementations have
something pretty nifty included.
> ...
> High quality software is not impossible, impractical, or insane--it is
> a worthwhile goal to be strived for. Communism and anti-innovation
> *are* impossible, impractical, *and* insane. How can you complain of
> sleeping masses and lack of individualism and, in the same breath,
> promote communism? Anti-innovation is just as ludicrous. People will
> innovate--if they did not, we would all be sitting around in caves,
> unable to figure out that we could get more food by sharpening a stick
> and throwing it at an animal.
>
> Your beliefs that communism and anti-innovation are worthwhile
> endeavors does lend more insight to your hatred of one man for making
> so much more than the others, and to your rejection of new technology.
I am curious about your definition of communism. I find it rather odd
that you read communist propaganda into Erik's post. As for
innovation: you seem to confuse gratuitous incompatibilities with
innovation. I'll abstain to draw any conclusions about your political
orientation from that.
> ...
--
Hartmann Schaffer
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
scha...@netcom.ca (hs)
Martin Rodgers
In article <31079640...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> * Martin Rodgers
> | Have you anything better to offer than bile?
>
> what you do think you deserve? you change the subject to "free market
> bashing" as if anyone but you had a problem with the free market and you
> direct followups to alt.fan.bill-gates and comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,
> as if anyone but you would like to post to such moronic newsgroups.
Nice ranting, Erik. It belongs in an advocacy newsgroup, with all the
other politics. Is comp.lang.lisp about MS or a programming language?
> why do you whine every time you get what you deserve but never learn to
> do something different? you don't _have_ to post stupid drivel, do you?
You don't have to post such bile, do you? I'm serious. I'm not whining.
As I explained, I expect the problem to go away in a few years, or at
least radically change. Money talks, and the market listens. All you have
to do is show how using Lisp leads to making more money. If the gain is
big enough, the market will follow. If you rant and call all businesses
using MS software stupid, don't be surprised if such people write you off
as a loony. It's all in the message. Make it sweet, and they'll listen.
Make it sour, and they'll ignore you. Simple human nature.
The problem is that most people see the world in terms of money and a 5
year business plan. Why should we expect them to appreciate the long term
effects of poor software? The irony is that, in a few years, such
software could easily result in the bean counters getting their butts
kicked very hard.
So, my plan is simple. Wait until the butt kick starts, say "I told you
so", and offer some alternatives to the current "popular" tools.
Apparently, Mrs Thatcher said, "You can't buck the market". While I'd
disagree with most of the things she's said, I don't deny that some
people may still believe it. All I'm saying is that we might use the
market. Let it choose better software.
Is this whining or a plan to constructively change the world?
Martin Rodgers
In article <31079641...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> you buy from somebody else. just how hard can it be to grasp this?
Have you noticed what people are buying? I may buy non-MS (as I have),
but what difference does that make? Small, but significant. I've not
bought _any_ MS software, other than what came bundled with one machine.
Nor will I willingly buy any. Ever. Small but significant.
Has the world changed yet? I doubt it. I expect to see a bigger change
in, say, two years from now. A _much_ bigger change. My sig file will be
saying, "Y2K? See, I told you so!" Small but significant.
Steel, oil, rail...And software.
Christopher B. Browne
On 27 Jun 1998 19:23:06 +0000, Erik Naggum <cle...@naggum.no> posted:
>* Martin Rodgers
>| How do we "vote" for better business ethics without sounding like
>| socialists?
>
It may not be that simple.
US politics has often been accused of providing two parties that are
*both* undeserving of votes. I don't get to vote in US elections; this
is not an unhappy situation as I can't really be supportive of either
of the significant parties.
The same can be true in business when power in the marketplace
concentrates into relatively few hands. I can despise Microsoft; that
does not necessarily leave me with alternatives when the "witless cattle"
that decide to market products decide that M$ is the only platform
they'll support.
--
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
cbbr...@hex.net - "What have you contributed to Linux today?..."
Erik Naggum
* Martin Rodgers
| I may buy non-MS (as I have), but what difference does that make?
the only difference that counts. you can't spend anybody else's money
any differently, only your own. if you don't want to persuade others on
the individual level where this principle applies, you have to play with
big marketing money and work to shift public sentiments (which you have
demonstrated that you don't want to understand how works, so let's just
forget that others do). if you don't want to do what it takes, just get
out of the game entirely -- you can only communicate your defeat and
resignation if you are as inefficacious as you imply in every whimpering,
whining article here, and there's no wonder you feel bad.
| Has the world changed yet?
yes, of course it has, but you insist on measuring "the world" with a
resolution that guarantees that you wouldn't see any differences until
something that hits you in the head measures 7.0 on Richter's Scale.
there's a description of depression that says that being depressed is all
about not seeing the small and insignificant tidbits of happiness around
you that all the significant ones are made of while you're getting more
and more depressed waiting for the significant one that could take you
out of your depression, but it never comes, because everything is too
small and too insignificant to "count", and downward it goes from there.
the same principle applies to any form of being and feeling efficacious,
and especially to sales forces who must regard every _single_ sale as
more significant than all the rejections before it, because they only
make one sale at a time, and it's all they can do to keep afloat to let
each sale vindicate their efforts.
if you can't handle this psychological requirement of "evangelizing" or
selling good ideas or products or yourself or whatever, don't even _try_
to pretend that your sense of defeat or inefficacy has anything to do
with anything but yourself. it's you, and _only_ you, that is the
problem if you can't make such a sale --- just wise up to the fact that
you're just not cut out for it and leave the scene to those who _can_
handle it. being a good salesman is all about first selling yourself the
idea that you _can_ actually handle this, and then letting every sale
reinforce that belief. but lose that crucial faith, and you're history,
no matter how many sales you make or don't make. it's _all_ psychology.
the world changes with every significant action you make. if you feel
the world doesn't change when you act, either your actions are truly
insignificant, or you're just depressed. now you can go hang yourself or
you can go do something significant. my suggestion if you want to keep
whining and bemoaning the state of the world is to put yourself out of
your misery as soon as possible (please let me try to sell you the rope),
but you _could_ also try getting out of your depression and one good way
is to start noticing what software people are actually buying. (do you
recognize that question?) every single computer in the world that sports
a Common Lisp environment is important to its programmer and its vendor
(or author); why isn't it to you? every single sale of a Linux CD-ROM is
important to the customer and the Free Software world; why isn't it to
you? every single transfer of the Association of Lisp Users web page to
somebody browser is important to the Lisp community; why isn't it to you?
Martin Rodgers
In article <31080148...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> * Martin Rodgers
> | I may buy non-MS (as I have), but what difference does that make?
>
> the only difference that counts. you can't spend anybody else's money
> any differently, only your own. if you don't want to persuade others on
> the individual level where this principle applies, you have to play with
> big marketing money and work to shift public sentiments (which you have
> demonstrated that you don't want to understand how works, so let's just
> forget that others do). if you don't want to do what it takes, just get
> out of the game entirely -- you can only communicate your defeat and
> resignation if you are as inefficacious as you imply in every whimpering,
> whining article here, and there's no wonder you feel bad.
>
> | Has the world changed yet?
>
> yes, of course it has, but you insist on measuring "the world" with a
> resolution that guarantees that you wouldn't see any differences until
> something that hits you in the head measures 7.0 on Richter's Scale.
This belongs in alt.fan.bill-gates, along with all the other Microsoft
hatemail. Perhaps you've not realised that you're not the only one who
dislikes MS? Playing by your rules, I could use this to call you
clueless, but I find that insulting people isn't constructive.
It's a great way to invite the Murdock press to call us loonies. Here in
the UK, phrases like "loony left" still haunt us. It might not be
apparent outside the UK, but the party currently in power used to be
socialists. Now they're merely New Labour. One of the Old Labour MPs used
to be called "Red Ken".
This kind of politics divides and weakens us, which is just what people
like Murdock and Gates would like.
> there's a description of depression that says that being depressed is all
> about not seeing the small and insignificant tidbits of happiness around
> you that all the significant ones are made of while you're getting more
> and more depressed waiting for the significant one that could take you
> out of your depression, but it never comes, because everything is too
> small and too insignificant to "count", and downward it goes from there.
I can speak of clinical depression from direct experience; It's like not
being able to see any beauty. Imagine a world without beauty. I've seen
it. While that was a couple of decades ago, I remember it well.
> the same principle applies to any form of being and feeling efficacious,
> and especially to sales forces who must regard every _single_ sale as
> more significant than all the rejections before it, because they only
> make one sale at a time, and it's all they can do to keep afloat to let
> each sale vindicate their efforts.
Agreed. This is the problem with bean counters. They count the wrong
things. My point, which you've ignored, is that a year and half from now
those bean counters are going to get a re-education. While we can talk,
and we can code, the bean counters won't notice because they're not
counting us. Yep, you _and_ me. We're on the same side, Erik, even if we
disagree about the solutions.
My bet is that class of software bugs is going to cost the business world
a lot more than we can hope to make in our lifetimes. Loads of zeroes.
> if you can't handle this psychological requirement of "evangelizing" or
> selling good ideas or products or yourself or whatever, don't even _try_
> to pretend that your sense of defeat or inefficacy has anything to do
> with anything but yourself. it's you, and _only_ you, that is the
> problem if you can't make such a sale --- just wise up to the fact that
> you're just not cut out for it and leave the scene to those who _can_
> handle it. being a good salesman is all about first selling yourself the
> idea that you _can_ actually handle this, and then letting every sale
> reinforce that belief. but lose that crucial faith, and you're history,
> no matter how many sales you make or don't make. it's _all_ psychology.
People have been giving us this "hard sell" for years, not just for
hardware and software, but for everything. Please forgive me for being
just a little cynical. I guess the last 20 years of UK politics have
something to do with that. Who to trust, who to trust?
I don't believe in magic bullets. I do believe that money talks. Anyway,
you don't have to convince me, I'm on your side. I've been there since
the mid 80s. I've sometimes managed to convince other people, and if
that's what you mean by a "sale", then I can do it. However, no amount of
"hard sell" is as effective as an argument that let's money do the
talking. It's naive to assume that everyone will see things as you do.
> the world changes with every significant action you make. if you feel
> the world doesn't change when you act, either your actions are truly
> insignificant, or you're just depressed. now you can go hang yourself or
> you can go do something significant. my suggestion if you want to keep
> whining and bemoaning the state of the world is to put yourself out of
> your misery as soon as possible (please let me try to sell you the rope),
> but you _could_ also try getting out of your depression and one good way
> is to start noticing what software people are actually buying. (do you
> recognize that question?) every single computer in the world that sports
> a Common Lisp environment is important to its programmer and its vendor
> (or author); why isn't it to you? every single sale of a Linux CD-ROM is
> important to the customer and the Free Software world; why isn't it to
> you? every single transfer of the Association of Lisp Users web page to
> somebody browser is important to the Lisp community; why isn't it to you?
Why do you assume that I'm pro-Microsoft and anti-Linux, pro-C++ and
anti-Lisp? I've spent more money on Common Lisp than C++, dispite being
_paid_ to use C++. I'm on _your_ side. However, I also recognise that
Bill Gates isn't the only problem in the world. Some people feel just as
you do about Rupert Murdock. Not too long ago, one of them was telling me
that he refuses to use cable or satellite TV because he won't give any of
his money to Murdock. I told him that it could go to Gates instead. Gates
isn't alone in creating monopolies. His is computers, Murdock's is TV and
newspapers, Ted Turner also has a TV empire, and others in the past have
created monopolies with oil, steel, etc. The more things change, eh?
The problem is that most people see the world in terms of money and a 5
year business plan. Why should we expect them to appreciate the long term
effects of poor software? The irony is that, in a few years, such
software could easily result in the bean counters getting their butts
kicked very hard.
So, my plan is simple. Wait until the butt kick starts, say "I told you
so", and offer some alternatives to the current "popular" tools.
Apparently, Mrs Thatcher said, "You can't buck the market". While I'd
disagree with most of the things she said, I don't deny that some people
may still believe it. All I'm saying is that we might use the market. Let
it choose better software.
We can win. We're merely disagreeing about tactics. I like using the
tools of the opposition - corporate fears and greed - to work for _us_.
Erik Naggum
* Erik Naggum
| you buy from somebody else. just how hard can it be to grasp this?
* Christopher B. Browne
| It may not be that simple.
well, yes, it always is that simple. it's called "acting on principle".
| The same can be true in business when power in the marketplace
| concentrates into relatively few hands. I can despise Microsoft; that
| does not necessarily leave me with alternatives when the "witless cattle"
| that decide to market products decide that M$ is the only platform
| they'll support.
have you really _needed_ a piece of software that runs only on Microsoft?
I have never seen _anything_ published solely in the Windows market that
had me go "wow! that software really _would_ make my life easier! how I
wish I had a PC with Windows!". supposing I already had invested in a PC
with Windows, what would I _want_ to buy for it, except various idiot
tools to help me survive the many inherent limitations of the system and
make it more like a real computer, which by the time I had got all the
crappy add-ons, I could get for less money? never has any Microsoft
victim been able to show me anything they do on their PC's that I cannot
do at least as well on my SPARCstation, and usually faster even the first
time -- of tasks that _matter_, that is. entertainment is something else.
if you are into selling cheap goods that nobody needs to millions of
bored people who crave entertainment, choose Microsoft and make lots of
money. if you think mass marketing is a serious liability, like I do
("if it's acceptable to the large fraction of the population that base
their buying decisions on TV commercials, how could it possibly be good
enough for me?"), avoid them entirely, because the Microsoft world has
_nothing_ to offer anyone except ubiquity at this time.
Erik Naggum
* Martin Rodgers
| Nice ranting, Erik.
get the hell out of my face, Martin Rodgers! go find somebody else to
pester with your depressingly moronic whining and disgusting obsequity.
if you want my wholehearted approval for something you do, try suicide.
Martin Rodgers
In article <31080211...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> have you really _needed_ a piece of software that runs only on Microsoft?
When a client insists on it, yes. The alternative is find new clients.
Are there enough clients who don't use MS software for every software
house? Again, this is money talking. We go where the money is. It may be
a little hard to understand, but not everyone has the freedom to choose
who to work for. It's very arrogant to suggest otherwise.
That's why people call it "market pressure". Yep, it's pressure. If you
can resist it, then you're either very lucky, or you have a secret that
is worth a _lot of money_. I say that because so few people believe that
you can, in the words of Mrs Thatcher, "buck the market". That should be
a good enough reason to try it; anything that proves her wrong is fine
with me. I support bucking the market, as I suspect you also do.
This is why I've been saying for years: share the secret. Instead of
insulting people for not using Lisp, we should lead them to Lisp. Instead
of telling them them Lisp is, let them discover it for themselves. That
way, their egos will tell them how wonderful _they_ are for making the
discovery. After all, we don't need the credit ourselves.
The hard sell technique is perfect for people who want the credit for
themselves. MS do this. They're masters of the hard sell. The soft sell
gives a bigger win, because the buyer invests more than money. They
invest their ego. In a few years from now, MS will lose big time, while
we will win merely by saying, "I told you so", and reminding everyone
what we've been saying for years: you can win big with Lisp.
Martin Rodgers
In article <31080222...@naggum.no>, cle...@naggum.no says...
> get the hell out of my face, Martin Rodgers! go find somebody else to
> pester with your depressingly moronic whining and disgusting obsequity.
> if you want my wholehearted approval for something you do, try suicide.
Ah, more bile. This is your "go away your stupid" response. Ignore what I
say, pretend that we have nothing in common, and we don't both use Lisp?
I don't ask for your approval; I merely refuse your bile. I offer a
positive way to attack MS, while you only offer your hate. I point out
that bashing MS isn't enough, that we must kill the ideas that created
and support MS, and you flame me. Am I too extreme for you, or not
extreme enough?
I say beware of not merely Gates, but also Murdock. Not even Murdock can
question the power of the market, of the dollar. If crap software costs
companies enough money, they'll realise that they've been paying money to
the wrong people. It's a simple plan: wait a year and a half and then
say, "Told you so".
Or are you naive enough to think that discussing the failings of MS on
UseNet will change as much as a global software disaster?
The revolution begins on Jan 1, 2000. See you there.
Hartmann Schaffer
Martin Rodgers wrote:
> ... I've not
> bought _any_ MS software, other than what came bundled with one machine.
> Nor will I willingly buy any. Ever. Small but significant.
You could make a point by buying hardware that does not come bundled
with MS software (difficult in the PC world, but possible).
> ...
Btw, this is leading too far away from the subject of this NG. Any
suggestions where to redirect it to (other than alt.null)?
Martin Rodgers
In article <35969620...@netcom.ca>, scha...@netcom.ca says...
> You could make a point by buying hardware that does not come bundled
> with MS software (difficult in the PC world, but possible).
This is exactly what I did, just a few months ago.
> Btw, this is leading too far away from the subject of this NG. Any
> suggestions where to redirect it to (other than alt.null)?
I made that point a few days ago. I set followups to more appropriate
newsgroups, which Erik ignored. In fact, he flamed me for doing it.
Ho hum.
Erik Naggum
* Martin Rodgers
| I don't ask for your approval; I merely refuse your bile.
so refuse it in a way that _works_! geez, how stupid _are_ you?
one good way to refuse my "bile" is to stop being such an annoying pest
that "bile" is the only thing you deserve. you can stop posting more of
the insane drivel you constantly impute to me; just stop telling me what
I think and stick to telling us what _you_ think, if you do -- you appear
to have the mental capacity of a dodo, but only because it's extinct, and
I'd vastly prefer if you matched it in that particular capacity, as well.
_just_ _go_ _away_, OK?
damn, there's no alt.fan.martin-rodgers newsgroup.
Scott L. Burson
Zeno wrote:
>
> What I am trying to do is to figure out if I would get efficiency
> gains if I become proficient in Lisp. The only answers I seem to get
> are such as yours, which say if I don't think it will benefit me, then
> why bother with it? Is there a reason why no one says that Lisp
> programs can be developed more efficiently than with VB, or that Lisp
> programs are more portable than C programs?
I actually know an expert Prolog programmer who likes VB for what it is. He
likes the ease of UI development and the availability of components for that
purpose. Of course he still does all the heavy-duty algorithmic stuff in
Prolog; he wouldn't think of trying to do that in VB. I haven't used VB myself,
but I expect that a comparison between Lisp and VB would go similarly: Lisp
would be far preferable for heavy-duty computation, while VB would have
advantages over most Lisps for UI development. (There are some Lisps with very
nice UI toolkits, notably Digitool's Macintosh Common Lisp, but I don't know
what's available in this regard for the Windows environment.)
As for portability, there's good news and bad news. Common Lisp programs are
much more portable between CL implementations than C programs (provided, of
course, they don't take advantage of vendor-specific goodies like UI toolkits).
But CL implementations do not exist for as many different machines. Still, it
doesn't sound like portability is that high a priority for you. It sounds like
you could be happy doing everything on NT.
> I want innovation to continue, and the best that can be done
> is to give the new program the ability to save in the old format, can
> you see a better way?
As dismayed as I am by the manner in which Erik Naggum chooses to express
himself, I do think he has a good point about file formats designed for forward
compatibility. Microsoft could certainly put more effort into designing these,
if they cared to.
> [W]hen
> someone else posted that Lisp may not be suitable for small programs,
> another flurry started which said that Lisp was good for such programs
> because all programs become larger than originally expected
There is some truth to that. Most programs do grow.
> I am putting together a website which uses a large database. This
> site must access the data fast, display forms and graphical data
> quickly, and learn from experience. It must be flexible enough that
> as the web interface change over time, and as the amount of data grows
> and the data server is changed, the main-program/rules-engine should
> not become obsolete or overloaded and have to be rewritten. I was
> looking to see if I should stick with the languages I currently use
> with some intelligence and adaptability added by calling Prolog, or if
> I should write the whole thing in Lisp.
I think either Prolog or Lisp could serve you well. Lisp has the advantage (as
I believe someone has mentioned) that there is already an HTTP server written in
it which you could probably use (I don't know what the licensing considerations
are). Either Prolog or Lisp will take you some time to become proficient in,
however.
> The website would also allow users to download smallish utilities to
> run on their own computers which would help them use the website.
Someone else suggested Java for this purpose, and I agree -- that's exactly what
it's designed for. The caveat is that Java implementations are not mature and
robust yet. Still, given what you're trying to do, my guess is that it's worth
putting up with a bit of flakiness in order to be able to run inside people's
Web browsers (very convenient).
In any case, I don't recommend Lisp for this application.
> If there are no computers in the office when I
> get there, they are in the Windows environment when I leave. This is
> not going to change. I wondered if Lisp proficiency would help me to
> be more productive and serve them better. (The first answer to this,
> I know, will be that I can serve them better by making sure they're
> not in the Windows environment--but this is not true.)
Well, we Macintosh users would beg to differ :-) But I know, the dearth of
applications for the Mac these days is discouraging.
I would say that Lisp proficiency will help you to serve your customers better
insofar as you may be able to use it for fairly sophisticated tasks such as your
web server. As you note, most of the other things you do are probably not
appropriate applications for Lisp, under the circumstances.
-- Scott
* * * * *
To use the email address, remove all occurrences of the letter "q".
Scott L. Burson
David B. Lamkins wrote:
>
> In article <3596EC14...@zeta-sqoft.com>, "Scott L. Burson"
> <Gy...@zeta-sqoft.com> wrote:
> >But CL implementations do not exist for as many different machines.
>
> Unix, Linux, MacOS and embedded systems, there is at least one good
> commercial implementation of Common Lisp for each.
Well, but "Unix" isn't a single platform, as there are multiple versions of Unix
running on a wide variety of hardware. Even Linux, which you might think of as
a single thing, runs on various CPUs. (And then there's NT on the Alpha.) The
less popular combinations are generally not served by Common Lisp, but *all* of
them have C.
Of course, depending on what kind of application one is trying to deliver, this
may or may not be an issue. The major platforms are pretty well covered these
days, and that may be enough.
Scott L. Burson
David B. Lamkins wrote:
>
> Yeah, it's hard to break the Macintosh mindset. Remember that programs
> written for 68K Mac OS 0.x (i.e. 1983 vintage prerelease) can still run,
> unmodified and un-recompiled, on the latest hardware and software. And
> the processor today doesn't even run the same instruction set!
Uh, I guess. I haven't always had luck running ancient Mac apps under System 7
(haven't tried 8 yet).
> How far can you expect Common Lisp vendors to push? Do they really _need_
> to have an environment available everywhere there's a C/C++ compiler in
> order to be successful?
No, probably not, but some potential customers may nonetheless find that an
environment they care about is not supported.
Scott L. Burson
David B. Lamkins wrote:
>
> In article <359bbde0...@news.deltanet.com>, ze...@deltanet.com (Zeno)
> wrote:
>
> >If you write a CL application which runs on Linux, will it run with
> >Linux on any hardware platform, or would you need different code or a
> >different compilation for each? If a CL application runs on Linux,
> >will it also run on Unix?
> >
>
> No. Here's my take on the situation; perhaps a Unix expert will offer
> corrections: Unix implementations are flavored by both processor
> instruction set architecture (ISA) and OS version. Any pairing is, in
> general, incompatible with all others, with the possible exception of OS
> bugfix releases on the same hardware.
>
> This means that any Unix program _must_ be recompiled for a particular ISA
> and OS version. This is the essential technical reason that free Unix
> software is distributed in source code form.
This is basically correct, although I gather there have been attempts at greater
binary compatibility among the x86 Unices -- since I don't have an x86, I
haven't paid close attention to this -- and some Unices have specific
compatibility support for running most if not quite all executables from another
version (for instance, Sun Solaris on the SPARC will run most SunOS binaries).
So back to Zeno's question: to run on a specific hardware/OS combination, you
need a Common Lisp that runs on that combination. Exactly how hard it is to
move to a different platform depends on the situation. If, for instance, you
develop for ACL (Allegro Common Lisp) on x86 under Linux, and you want to move
to SPARC under Solaris, you can just buy the ACL for Solaris from Franz and
recompile; you probably won't have to change your code at all. On the other
hand, if you wanted to port to a platform that required changing Lisp vendors,
you might have to modify your code somewhat, depending on exactly what it is
doing. Code that is primarily computational, and uses only features defined in
the Common Lisp specification, almost always ports with little or no
modification. If you're doing OS-related stuff (like sockets or something) that
relies on features outside the standard, you're likely to have a bit more work
to do. And of course if you're using a vendor-specific GUI or other such
package, you'll have quite a bit of work to do.
However I must warn you about something. Franz in particular has had a couple
of Lisp implementations from other sources that they have at various times
purchased the rights to (along with at least one they developed in-house). They
have had what I consider to be the somewhat misleading practice of calling them
all Allegro, even though they were separate implementations that didn't share
source code. Coral Common Lisp, for instance, was developed by Coral, bought by
Apple, then sold to Franz; Franz subsequently sold it to Digitool, but during
the time they carried it, they called it "Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp". And
it is my understanding that their Windows products, also called "Allegro", were,
at least originally, of yet another lineage; I'm not sure about the situation
today.
In contrast, to my knowledge, all of their Lisps for any version of Unix share
the vast bulk of their source code, excepting only the compiler backend and
various OS-interface routines that (unfortunately) are not 100% portable between
different Unices.
While it is true that code that sticks to the Common Lisp specification is
highly portable, it is also the case that code that uses a lot of
implementation-specific extensions is not so portable. Secondly, there are
differences in garbage collectors, compilers, and other environmental aspects,
that sometimes become relevant to very complex applications. And thirdly, the
overall quality of different implementations can certainly vary. I think that
Franz has called all of their Lisps "Allegro" quite intentionally, to obscure
their distinct lineages and to suggest that one can move an application between
any of them by just recompiling, period. This certainly was not the case a few
years ago, when some colleagues of mine were looking into porting a Unix ACL
application to Windows. It may be true, or more nearly true, now, but I don't
trust Franz in this area, and if I wanted to develop a Windows application I
would use their (or someone's) Windows product and not try to cross-develop from
Unix. It should be clear that I don't think highly of this practice on their
part.