why we aren't using lisp (was New to Lisp)
Kucera, Rich
Swing looking environment...
there doesn't appear to be any way to do OLE, no access to Windows type
library (although they
do provide lisp binding to Windows MCI, stopping any argument that we
are concerned with
portability)...
It's closed to custom Javabeans wrapped in ActiveX bridge, for example,
you could design your own
data access using whatever "free" JDBC/RMI/CORBA drivers you could lay
your hands on. It would
appear the only ways out you need the ODBC or the ORBlink (I'd choose
the latter, eschewing
distributing SQL in clients). Those things cost in the thousands, and
more for the runtime licenses.
My guess is, only being a part-time analyst, is that it's a licensing
issue. Sun and Microsoft, despite
their differences, have elaborate licensing to their mutual benefit.
They both have something the other
wants and the licenses are really what generate all the revenues, not
unit "sales". So everything seems
free unless you want something not on the menu--that's like my
subsidized cafeteria.
Now, if Microsoft "wanted" Lisp, we'd have another story. Right
now, putting the technology to
interface with the various operating systems(NT, Solaris) is very
expensive for Franz, I guess.
They'd have to pay dearly for the ability to insert an ActiveX object
into a form in the IDE, that
would make the product prohibitively expensive...unless they sold their
soul in a licensing agreement,
I suppose.
But Common Lisp is a fairly good standard, I understand, unlike SQL
(which again allows for
large companies to "have it" for themselves). And Java is no standard
of course. Perhaps in
this case being a standard actually limits Lisp's ability to be widely
used.
I just don't know about C++, seems to be a counter example to my
arguments here (VC++).
My last real line of Lisp was typed into a Symbolics back in fall of
1991, from then on it was C-based stuff,
really been stuck in appalachia ever since.
Emerging C/S N-tier architectures will allow us to have a Lisp tier
which we can access over one of the
various generic object buses (Orbs are still highly technical, not
simple like a "bean").
Then we can put objects in a viable, dynamic object system.
Plan & implement budget structures also would seem incompatible with
Lisping (exploratory),
but plan and implement also has a bad name with cost overruns and
slipping, staff turnover etc.
"Planning for growth" could revise the project management
strategies--but growth has its limits
if it's not going to be pathological. We shouldn't be too envious
looking at the arguably pathological
growth of Java. Who the hell is excited about Java anymore? I don't
know any...after the
AOL/Netscape/Sun deal and the resulting dropped products and staff
cuts--it's not free--
all the folks with industry certificates not to mention all the code
embedded in "deprecated"
APIs.
What to do? Convert VB and C++ programmers, infiltrate Microsoft,
then Franz could sell out.
Another thing to do would be to follow Sun's model and threaten
Microsoft with a virtual Lisp
machine...an entire platform. At the moment, Genera is available only
on DEC Alphas and
at what cost? Wonder why is there so little activity here if Lisp is
so cool, and it is.
I think Genera was the fattest client ever invented, the smaller
Unix/C/X approaches won out.
These days, we could have a huge Genera-like server and have
interoperability with small clients
in other languages.
Another thing is that Lispers tend to be highly educated and quiet,
compared to the loudmouths
who wanted to re-implement AI stuff in Unix/C back in 1991. The Lisp
community loses novices
to these loudmouths and to the money. N-tier is taking care of the
money part now, so we need
some mass marketing.
Why should we care about mass marketing? I read of a guy who got fired
for programming in Perl.
The company had mandated that everyone must use VBscript and apparently
had extensive
auditing to enforce this. This is just an extreme example. I'd like
to see more opportunities
to use Lisp professionally.
Just my 2 cents...
Lars Bjønnes
> Now, if Microsoft "wanted" Lisp, we'd have another story. Right
> now, putting the technology to
> interface with the various operating systems(NT, Solaris) is very
> expensive for Franz, I guess.
> They'd have to pay dearly for the ability to insert an ActiveX object
> into a form in the IDE, that
> would make the product prohibitively expensive...unless they sold their
> soul in a licensing agreement,
> I suppose.
I can't see why Franz would have to pay Microsoft a fee for using
ActiveX in their IDE, nor why they would have to sell their soul[0]
in a licensing agreement. AFAIK, Microsoft has no special 'financial
arrangements' for companies wanting to develop or provide support
for ActiveX-components. Anyone can download a SDK or subscribe to
their MSDN-library. However, numerous companies have signed NDAs with
Microsoft to get more information about Window's inner workings.
(And some of them are now dragging MS to court :-)
I'd be surprised if Microsoft didn't encourage companies like Franz
to incorporate their 'technologies' into products like ACL. If that's
not true, MS' mark.dept. is far worse than I thought.[1]
However, supporting multiple models on different platforms is (for
most companies, I'd believe), expensive in terms of development, QA and
support, if that's what you meant.
[0] Unless we are talking about good/evil
[1] Not only being deceptive, but incompetent as well
--
Lars
Stig E. Sandų
>It's closed to custom Javabeans wrapped in ActiveX bridge, for example,
>you could design your own
>data access using whatever "free" JDBC/RMI/CORBA drivers you could lay
>your hands on. It would
>appear the only ways out you need the ODBC or the ORBlink (I'd choose
>the latter, eschewing
>distributing SQL in clients). Those things cost in the thousands, and
>more for the runtime licenses.
If this is a Windows-specific thing I don't know much about that. But if
you were using a Unix-system you could get at least some CORBA support
through Xerox Parc's ILU (ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html). At
least my distributed hypermedia-system (CLOS) communicates decently with
the Java-clients, using ILU for CL and ORBacus (I think it was) for Java.
It's probably not ORBLink, but it works ok enough for prototyping.
And as for ODBC-support that was mentioned a week or two ago in this group
(where one alternative supported Windows and Macs too).
[snip lotsof "it's the end of the world for Lisp" stuff]
>Another thing is that Lispers tend to be highly educated and quiet,
>compared to the loudmouths
>who wanted to re-implement AI stuff in Unix/C back in 1991. The Lisp
>community loses novices
>to these loudmouths and to the money.
People do figure it out, mysteriously enough, despite all the noise. I am
probably a novice (at least with Lisp) but I somehow understood that to
create the dynamic systems I envisioned and wanted, Lisp was the good
answer. I'm not sure what you mean by highly educated.. but maybe you need
to have been exposed to enough other languages, systems, theory, etc. to
grasp why it is the Right Thing (at least compared to the alternatives).
Some of that might come through education and some through experience.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
Stig Erik Sandø Institute of Art History, UiB Norway
Joachim Achtzehnter
>
> If this is a Windows-specific thing I don't know much about
> that. But if you were using a Unix-system you could get at least
> some CORBA support through Xerox Parc's ILU
> (ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html).
ILU's Lisp mapping also works on the MS Windows platform with both
Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
Joachim
--
joa...@kraut.bc.ca (http://www.kraut.bc.ca)
joa...@mercury.bc.ca (http://www.mercury.bc.ca)
David Bakhash
> st...@kunst.uib.no (Stig E. Sandų) writes:
> >
> > If this is a Windows-specific thing I don't know much about
> > that. But if you were using a Unix-system you could get at least
> > some CORBA support through Xerox Parc's ILU
> > (ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html).
>
> ILU's Lisp mapping also works on the MS Windows platform with both
> Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
first try it out, using ACL5 and MS Windows, and _then_ you can say this
(above). I actually gave it a shot, and it was a big failure (unless
something changed over the last 2 weeks).
I'm sure the guys over at Xerox Parc got it to work, but they didn't make it
easily buildable for those downloading it.
dave
Joachim Achtzehnter
>
> Joachim Achtzehnter <joa...@kraut.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > ILU's Lisp mapping also works on the MS Windows platform with both
> > Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
>
> first try it out, using ACL5 and MS Windows, and _then_ you can say
> this (above).
Not only did I _try_ it out, my company is using ILU's Lisp mapping
for ACL5 on NT as a mission-critical component of a production system
that has a 7 digit price tag.
> I actually gave it a shot, and it was a big failure (unless
> something changed over the last 2 weeks).
At the time when the latest ILU release came out ACL5 was not yet
widely used and ILU's Lisp mapping had been tested with ACL5 only on
Unix. In the meantime several patches have been posted to the ILU Web
site to make it work on Windows. It is possible that some patches
haven't made it to the patch page yet. You can always ask on the ILU
mailing list. Questions with sufficient detail are usually answered
promptly.
> I'm sure the guys over at Xerox Parc got it to work, but they didn't
> make it easily buildable for those downloading it.
AFAIK, the ILU group at Xerox Parc doesn't have access to the Windows
version of Allegro, hence they must rely on others to test on this
platform. This makes it a little more difficult. I will admit that it
takes a little effort. Whether this effort is worth it depends on how
badly you need CORBA support for Lisp ;-) The big advantage of a free
software package like ILU is that even if your combination of
programming language and platform isn't the vendor's highest priority,
you are always free to take whatever is available and make it
work.
Kucera, Rich
> > If this is a Windows-specific thing I don't know much about
> > that. But if you were using a Unix-system you could get at
least
> > some CORBA support through Xerox Parc's ILU
> > (ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html).
>
both
> Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
first try it out, using ACL5 and MS Windows, and _then_ you can
say this
(above). I actually gave it a shot, and it was a big failure
(unless
something changed over the last 2 weeks).
I'm sure the guys over at Xerox Parc got it to work, but they
didn't make it
easily buildable for those downloading it.
Yeah it's still highly technical and seems to bring on it's own set of
problems...
(the whole corba thing, I mean have you ever looked at an IOR, geez)
have to
try it out first...Can you give details on your experience with it?
My current block is that there is no free lisp build for ILU that I know
of. I'm using
cmucl on solaris. So I can't get to the rich set of free proprietary
drivers in JavaLand...
unless I do this, er, FFI thing? Perhaps that would be best...or a
little socket
programming for pete's sake.
Joachim Achtzehnter
The whole point of CORBA is that you don't have to look inside an IOR,
just treat it as an opaque handle for an object. It doesn't matter
where the object's implementation is located or in which programming
language it was written.
> Can you give details on your experience with it?
You are talking about ILU's Lisp mapping I assume? We are using it for
a large, mission-critical project and found ILU quite robust. As
someone else mentioned, it can be a bit of an effort to get going if
you use it with a combination of programming language and platform
that is not in active use by the Xerox/PARC people.
> My current block is that there is no free lisp build for ILU that I
> know of. I'm using cmucl on solaris.
Yes, it would be nice if ILU supported cmucl. I toyed with the idea of
writing such a mapping but dropped it when reading the documentation
about cmucl's C interface. ILU's core is written in C and all the
other language mappings are just thin wrappers around the C core. This
requires extensive support for calls in both directions. Last time I
looked cmucl's support for calls from C to Lisp was problematic and
there was some mention of severe limits on how much heap space foreign
code can allocate.
Klaus Schilling
> Joachim Achtzehnter <joa...@kraut.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > st...@kunst.uib.no (Stig E. Sandų) writes:
> > >
> > > If this is a Windows-specific thing I don't know much about
> > > that. But if you were using a Unix-system you could get at least
> > > some CORBA support through Xerox Parc's ILU
> > > (ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html).
> >
> > ILU's Lisp mapping also works on the MS Windows platform with both
> > Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
>
> first try it out, using ACL5 and MS Windows, and _then_ you can say this
> (above). I actually gave it a shot, and it was a big failure (unless
> something changed over the last 2 weeks).
>
> I'm sure the guys over at Xerox Parc got it to work, but they didn't make it
> easily buildable for those downloading it.
With or without cygwin32 tools from Cygnus Solutions?
Klaus Schilling
Joachim Achtzehnter
>
> > > ILU's Lisp mapping also works on the MS Windows platform with
> > > both Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
>
ILU supports the Win32 platform using Microsoft's Visual C++
compiler. Unix compatibility packages like cygwin32 are not needed.
David Bakhash
with.
dave
(I'll try to give it another shot, but I don't know if I'll have enough time
before I lose the eval copy of ACL :-(
Stig E. Sandų
>
>My current block is that there is no free lisp build for ILU that I know
>of.
This depends on your definition of "free". If your use qualifies with the
license the ACL 5 Trial Version for Linux, it is "free" (as in free
beer). It works decently with ILU.
Klaus Schilling
> On Tue, 15 Jun 1999 13:57:56 -0400, Kucera, Rich <kuc...@hhmi.org> wrote:
> >
> >My current block is that there is no free lisp build for ILU that I know
> >of.
>
> This depends on your definition of "free". If your use qualifies with the
> license the ACL 5 Trial Version for Linux, it is "free" (as in free
> beer). It works decently with ILU.
Freedom has been defined bt R.M.Stallman on www.gnu.org , and ACL is tons
of miles away from the truth. ACL is downright proprietary, thus useless.
Klaus Schilling
Duane Rettig
Right.
There's an older definition of Freedom:
"Freedom's just another word for 'nothin left to lose'"
J. Joplin in "Bobby MaGee"
--
Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www)
1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)
Tim Bradshaw
> Freedom has been defined bt R.M.Stallman on www.gnu.org , and ACL is tons
> of miles away from the truth. ACL is downright proprietary, thus useless.
Is there a gnu-sense free java system which works with ILU? is *ILU*
free in the gnu sense (hint: no, its license isn't nearly as demanding
as the gpl).
--tim
Joachim Achtzehnter
>
> is *ILU* free in the gnu sense (hint: no, its license isn't nearly
> as demanding as the gpl).
You are wrong on this point. The Free Software Foundation, and Richard
Stallman in particular, do not require that software be licensed under
the GPL in order to qualify as free software. They would prefer if
everybody used the GPL, but this doesn't imply they reject everything
else as non-free. Remember that the GNU project uses the X Window
system, which is not under GPL.
Speaking about ILU in particular, if I'm not mistaken, Stallman does
classify ILU as free software, given the recently amended license
terms.
Christopher R. Barry
> st...@kunst.uib.no (Stig E. Sandų) writes:
>
> > On Tue, 15 Jun 1999 13:57:56 -0400, Kucera, Rich <kuc...@hhmi.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >My current block is that there is no free lisp build for ILU that I know
> > >of.
> >
> > This depends on your definition of "free". If your use qualifies with the
> > license the ACL 5 Trial Version for Linux, it is "free" (as in free
> > beer). It works decently with ILU.
>
> Freedom has been defined bt R.M.Stallman on www.gnu.org , and ACL is tons
> of miles away from the truth. ACL is downright proprietary, thus useless.
Maybe if R.M.Stallman had an actual home and a wife and children that
he loved and took good care of instead of only having to feed himself
occasionally and living his life as an atheistic hermit, he might
actually be happy in life, and realize it's okay to be paid money and
have realistic job security for what it takes a lot of intelligence
and hard work to really do properly and an expensive education to
really do professionally.
No, selling documentation under profitable terms for your software is
not okay with R.M.Stallman, whom last year attacked Tim Oreilly at a
conference he was invited to for not making his documentation
"free". In many cases, selling only documentation or support or a
configuration tool is not a realistic way to have job security either,
unless you intentionally create the most brain-dead and cryptic
interface to your software's functionality that you possibly could
have. (Witness sendmail.)
He's a lunatic. And you are even more of a lunatic for worshipping
him. If he still liked CL, you would worship it and be flaming all the
schemers.
Christopher
Klaus Schilling
> Klaus Schilling <Klaus.S...@home.ivm.de> writes:
> > > Freedom has been defined bt R.M.Stallman on www.gnu.org , and ACL is tons
> > of miles away from the truth. ACL is downright proprietary, thus useless.
>
> Maybe if R.M.Stallman had an actual home and a wife and children that
All those things are plain obsolete. Only spiritually weak people could
appreciate home and family.
> he loved and took good care of instead of only having to feed himself
> occasionally and living his life as an atheistic hermit, he might
> actually be happy in life,
No one right in his mind can be happy in life.
>
> He's a lunatic. And you are even more of a lunatic for worshipping
> him.
I'm not an atheist, unlike RMS. So why would I worship'em?
> If he still liked CL, you would worship it and be flaming all the
> schemers.
Who said that Stallman does not like Common Lisp?
Klaus Schilling
Johan Kullstam
> cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
>
> > Klaus Schilling <Klaus.S...@home.ivm.de> writes:
> > > > Freedom has been defined bt R.M.Stallman on www.gnu.org , and ACL is tons
> > > of miles away from the truth. ACL is downright proprietary, thus useless.
> >
> > Maybe if R.M.Stallman had an actual home and a wife and children that
>
> All those things are plain obsolete. Only spiritually weak people could
> appreciate home and family.
!!!
> > he loved and took good care of instead of only having to feed himself
> > occasionally and living his life as an atheistic hermit, he might
> > actually be happy in life,
>
> No one right in his mind can be happy in life.
alright mr artur schopenhauer...
> >
> > He's a lunatic. And you are even more of a lunatic for worshipping
> > him.
>
> I'm not an atheist, unlike RMS. So why would I worship'em?
not *them* but *him*. if you, e.g., worship RMS as your god, then you
are not an atheist since you would *have a god*. therefore, not being
an atheist is actaully consistent with worshiping RMS. if you had
said that you are an atheist then, this would be inconsistant.
> > If he still liked CL, you would worship it and be flaming all the
> > schemers.
>
> Who said that Stallman does not like Common Lisp?
i do not know, but it sure seems that way. has RMS said this explicitly?
--
johan kullstam
David Bakhash
First off, ask yourself where CL was when elisp was created. Then, ask
yourself how many people discovered CL somehow through elisp, while they were
hacking at their .emacs files. I'm one of them, and I'm happy that Emacs
evolved the way it did. I couldn't care less if RMS likes or dislikes CL, but
he *did* allow the inclusion of cl.el into GNU Emacs, and he will most
problably allow cl-array.el that I wrote recently to go in there too. I don't
think he intentionally tried to promote CL, but he has certainly had a lot to
do with its survival.
I also think that attacking someone's lifestyle is heartless. If you are
sitting there with a family, a wife, and people who love you, and you are
complacent in that lifestyle, then this should not make you want to look down
on him for his lifestyle. I imagine that it's hard enough to be alone, and
all of us have been at some point. No one needs you to say that our lives are
somehow pathetic. RMS, though pestilent to many, has had a net positive
influence. But to bring his personal lifestyle into this. My god. You must
feel so strong and secure to be able to attack people at that level.
I love free software, and I love making money for stuff that I work on. The
two don't always go hand-in-hand, but that doesn't mean that I have to pick
one or the other. RMS is a radical, and you might say that the world needs
people like that to keep the balance from the large corporations that work
towards the opposite extreme.
dave
Christopher R. Barry
> I couldn't care less if RMS likes or dislikes CL, but he *did* allow
> the inclusion of cl.el into GNU Emacs, and he will most problably
> allow cl-array.el that I wrote recently to go in there too.
Well, you'll learn soon enough how things like this actually work. If
you think your cl-array.el will be included into the base distribution
of GNU Emacs, you're almost certainly out of luck. You probably have a
decent chance of getting it to be an official XEmacs package in the new
package system if it isn't crap.
> I also think that attacking someone's lifestyle is heartless. If
> you are sitting there with a family, a wife, and people who love
> you, and you are complacent in that lifestyle, then this should not
> make you want to look down on him for his lifestyle. I imagine that
> it's hard enough to be alone, and all of us have been at some point.
> No one needs you to say that our lives are somehow pathetic. RMS,
> though pestilent to many, has had a net positive influence. But to
> bring his personal lifestyle into this. My god. You must feel so
> strong and secure to be able to attack people at that level.
Hey Dave, I'm just 19. I'm still alone and in a 1-bedroom apartment (no
family+wife). I think he has very extreme views, and his lifestyle that
most of us find unacceptable to be living at that age is relevant in
that if you are to accept his views, then his lifestyle is the only one
you can have with security, and you can not be happy, unless you're a
natural-born martyr/hermit.
Look at Linus Torvalds. He's made a huge contribution and he's a cool,
very together, sane, smart guy with a wife and children, and in
interviews he has said they are the biggest blessings in his life. He's
not super-rich; He drives a Pontiac and has a decent little house in San
Jose, but he seems happy, content and "normal."
> I love free software, and I love making money for stuff that I work
> on. The two don't always go hand-in-hand, but that doesn't mean
> that I have to pick one or the other.
With RMS you effectively do. It's "my way or the highway" with him.
Christopher
thi
please continue there.
thanks,
thi
Joachim Achtzehnter
> (no family+wife).
Then perhaps you should think twice before embarking on a silly attack
on the lifestyle of somebody who is several times your age and has
contributed more to the software development profession than most of
us ever will.
> his lifestyle is the only one you can have with security...
If you want to have a discussion about whether or not it is possible
to earn a living with free software, why not just discuss that? You
will find that people have many different views on this
subject. Lifestyle, however, is a totally different subject and
attacking somebody in this forum because he chooses a lifestyle you
don't like is simply pathetic.
Klaus Schilling
>
> Hey Dave, I'm just 19. I'm still alone and in a 1-bedroom apartment (no
> family+wife).
And if you're very lucky and clever, you will stay alone.
> I think he has very extreme views, and his lifestyle that
> most of us find unacceptable
Celibacy is the one and only true lifestyle for wise people like Plato
who would have programmed in Scheme, the most platonic language.
Anyone who strives for wisdom needs to follow such a lifestyle.
> to be living at that age is relevant in
It's their fault if they love the flesh more than the spirit.
>
> Look at Linus Torvalds. He's made a huge contribution and he's a cool,
> very together, sane, smart guy with a wife and children,
There's no such thing as sane people with wife and children and house
and car.
> and in
> interviews he has said they are the biggest blessings in his life. He's
> not super-rich; He drives a Pontiac and has a decent little house in San
> Jose, but he seems happy, content and "normal."
Home, family and material wealth are evils that keep people bound to
the relentlessly turning wheel of Sansara. Celibacy is the best way
to salvation.
Klaus Schilling
Christopher R. Barry
> cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
> >
> > Hey Dave, I'm just 19. I'm still alone and in a 1-bedroom apartment
> > (no family+wife).
>
> Then perhaps you should think twice before embarking on a silly attack
> on the lifestyle of somebody who is several times your age and has
> contributed more to the software development profession than most of
> us ever will.
Perhaps you should think, period, before replying to me. Now what has
RMS contributed to the "software development profession?" If anything,
he feels that those in the software development profession should not
be paid salaries like those in medical, law, scientific and
engineering professions when the cost of education, level of
challenge, amount of work, and intelligence requirements are equal if
not greater.
Smart people that work their butts off to do an honest job deserve
better. Sorry.
> Lifestyle, however, is a totally different subject and attacking
> somebody in this forum because he chooses a lifestyle you don't like
> is simply pathetic.
If he (and his minions like Klaus) insist that honest, well-meaning
companies like (for example) Franz are hoarders and putting their
users in bondage because they are a bunch of intelligent people
working their butts off to ship a high-quality product and to support
it properly while not putting the lifestyles they have earned in
unnecessary jeopardy, then he is far more guilty than I of
lifestyle-attacking.
<Forest-Gump>And thats all I have to say about that.</Forest-Gump>
Christopher
Barry Margolin
Christopher R. Barry <cba...@2xtreme.net> wrote:
>Perhaps you should think, period, before replying to me. Now what has
>RMS contributed to the "software development profession?" If anything,
>he feels that those in the software development profession should not
>be paid salaries like those in medical, law, scientific and
>engineering professions when the cost of education, level of
>challenge, amount of work, and intelligence requirements are equal if
>not greater.
What does salary have to do with whether the software is free or
proprietary? RMS earns his living as a contract programmer, so he gets
paid. All the employees of Cygnus are presumably paid salaries, and they
develop free software.
I'm glad I've only been following this thread sporadically. It looks like
it's as misinformed as most similar threads in gnu.misc.discuss.
--
Barry Margolin, bar...@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.
Christopher R. Barry
> What does salary have to do with whether the software is free or
> proprietary? RMS earns his living as a contract programmer, so he
> gets paid. All the employees of Cygnus are presumably paid
> salaries, and they develop free software.
Yes, and the team of 20 at Redhat that put together and package the
distribution (and Alan Cox), Netscape's Mozilla team employees,
etc. etc.... There are times it works, and it's great when it
does. But for many types of software products and software markets
this doesn't work.
Many people buy $50 Redhat CDs the day they come out and burn and ship
copies only for a couple dollars. Imagine what this kind of thing
would do to Lisp companies and Autodesk/CAD-companies and
3D-animation/pre-press companies and similar operations.
And as for RMS getting money as a contract programmer; He may insist
that his work be under the GPL, but it doesn't matter what license
that work is under if the company does not distribute the software,
which with contract programming there are not likely going to have any
desire or need to do.
We can't all be contract programmers, nor do we all desire to be.
Christopher
Klaus Schilling
> Joachim Achtzehnter <joa...@kraut.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
> > >
> > > Hey Dave, I'm just 19. I'm still alone and in a 1-bedroom apartment
> > > (no family+wife).
> >
> > Then perhaps you should think twice before embarking on a silly attack
> > on the lifestyle of somebody who is several times your age and has
> > contributed more to the software development profession than most of
> > us ever will.
>
> Perhaps you should think, period, before replying to me. Now what has
> RMS contributed to the "software development profession?"
The GNU Emacs, the one and only true masterpiece of software.
The HURD
and finally guile.
> If anything,
> he feels that those in the software development profession should not
> be paid salaries like those in medical, law, scientific and
> engineering professions when the cost of education, level of
> challenge, amount of work, and intelligence requirements are equal if
> not greater.
>
Irrelevant.
> Smart people that work their butts off to do an honest job deserve
> better. Sorry.
That's an insane capitalistic propaganda.
>
Klaus Schilling
Raymond Toy
Joachim> core. This requires extensive support for calls in both
Joachim> directions. Last time I looked cmucl's support for calls
Joachim> from C to Lisp was problematic and there was some mention
In what way was it problematic?
Joachim> of severe limits on how much heap space foreign code can
Joachim> allocate.
This limit has been mostly lifted in the x86 ports. FreeBSD supports
about 200 MB of foreign code/heap space and Linux supports about 128
MB.
Also, doesn't ILU require threads? Only the x86 port has threads; no
other versions of CMUCL has threads.
Ray
Bjørn Remseth
> He's a lunatic. And you are even more of a lunatic for worshipping
> him. If he still liked CL, you would worship it and be flaming all the
> schemers.
That's the problem. He's a brilliant lunatic and you can't tell which
way he'll jump - like his game is impossible to analyse. You can't
dissect him, predict him - which of course means he's not a lunatic at
all :)
--
(Rmz)
Bj\o rn Remseth !Institutt for Informatikk !Net: r...@ifi.uio.no
Phone:+47 91341332!Universitetet i Oslo, Norway !ICBM: N595625E104337
Bjørn Remseth
.. to those of you who didn't get it, this was a direct quote from the
musical "Chess" where the russian is explaining his KGB-employed
second Molokov why his american opponent isn't a lunatic, even if he
isn't behaving entirely in accordance with convention at all times ;)
Erik Naggum
| Maybe if R.M.Stallman had an actual home and a wife and children that he
| loved and took good care of instead of only having to feed himself
| occasionally and living his life as an atheistic hermit, he might
| have realistic job security for what it takes a lot of intelligence and
| hard work to really do properly and an expensive education to really do
| professionally.
of all the irrelevant drivel that people think criticizes RMS, you'll win
the Annual 1999 Lunatic Critic Award for worst ad hominem with special
mention of attaching the oh-so-evil label "atheistic" to him, as well.
my congratulations! and this mere days after the U.S. Congress voted to
help fight crime and gun accidents by posting the Ten Commandments in all
public schools. I'm mildly amused by the level of irrationality with
which some people meet fundamental problems, and it seems the U.S. will
get a lesbian President long before it gets an atheist President...
if you want to criticize RMS, know him. (no, that's not "you don't know
him, so you can't criticize him", but "know thine enemy".) that way, you
won't commit the incredibly embarrassing mistake of attacking him for
something he doesn't do wrong and by so doing, prove that you are not
attacking RMS, but some monster you have created in your own mind that
you try to make people believe is RMS through your _own_ evil ways and
propaganda, much like witch hunts or lynch mobs used to prosecute people
they didn't like, for entirely different reasons than people got agitated.
but since you bring it up, I wonder what kind of family values and
religious upbringing people _actually_ have who use them for ad hominem
attacks against others who aren't exactly like themselves. like, are
Christopher R. Barry's wife and children proud of him for defending them
against Richard M. Stallman's atheistic ideas?
| No, selling documentation under profitable terms for your software is not
| okay with R.M.Stallman, whom last year attacked Tim Oreilly at a
| conference he was invited to for not making his documentation "free".
he criticized the fact that the sources weren't available, not that the
books were sold for a profit. you obviously haven't noticed, but "free"
does not refer to price, _only_. consider the meaning of "free" in the
two phrases: "the free world" and "there ain't no such thing as a free
lunch". now, obviously, people have freedom and objects have prices, so
it's counter-productive to call it "free software", when what he's really
after is "free programmers". that's valid criticism, however stale by
this time.
| In many cases, selling only documentation or support or a configuration
| tool is not a realistic way to have job security either, ...
that isn't one of his points, either. you have obviously not noticed,
but the idea is to have people pay for the creation of software, but not
for being prohibited from using it, which is what the very prohibitive
licenses from companies like Microsoft are all about. striking the right
balance between sharing development costs and licensing to consumers is
the really tough job here.
| He's a lunatic. And you are even more of a lunatic for worshipping him.
| If he still liked CL, you would worship it and be flaming all the
| schemers.
whether the certified lunatic Klaus Schilling worships RMS because he was
a Scheme fanatic first or became a Scheme fanatic because RMS wants GUILE
to be a Scheme is actually very hard to tell. whether he is more of a
lunatic because of worshipping him or picked RMS to worship at random is
also very hard to tell. RMS is as plagued by lunatics who worship him as
he is plagued by lunatics who criticize him.
want my angle on this? RMS' desire for change is non-continuous and
cannot be reached incrementally from here, mostly because he rejects any
and all continuous and incremental changes. this means it won't happen,
no matter what he does. also note that it is _not_ the freeness of Emacs
that made it a success, nor was it the freeness of the sources for Linux
that made it a success. freeness is not even necessary for success, much
less sufficient. how can I say this? because MS-DOS succeeded the same
way both Emacs and Linux did: build a community, use community resources
to build further. why did the free Mozilla flop? (I haven't heard much
about it, but boy did I hear about the release of the sources, so I guess
not much has happened.) it had no community, and failed to build it.
now, community-building is not predicated on freeness of sources, not
even their general availability. you build communities by rewarding
people for their contributions and help them retain ownership of their
efforts. the curious thing is that free software doesn't actually _do_
that in any meaningful way, and old-timers in the free software world are
_extremely_ rare.
I'd like critics of RMS to consider a question that might put their
hostility towards him and their defense of such issues as "job security"
in a new light: who benefits from making job security so expensive?
indeed, who benefits from making modern life in general so expensive?
once you have thought about it for a while, consider the follow-up
questions: why do you defend them? why do you attack those who reject
them as lunatics? surely you aren't benefiting yourself, or you wouldn't
make the point that job security is so expensive and so hard, would you?
it's been said that the unique strength of the human species is that it
builds communities to solve problems so large that no individual could
even hope to solve any one of them alone. the software crisis appears to
me to be a serious lack of community effort to solve our problems, and a
bunch of people go off in each their own direction to solve the same old
problem for the thousandth if not millionth time. why do C/C++ fools
still manually write #include statements and why do Windows fools still
write GUIs mostly by hand? why do HTML generators produce so incredibly
crappy and verbose files? while mankind creates communities and tries to
solve huge problems, programmers are obsessing about the execution time
and internal representation of LENGTH on strings, just to take a random
sampling from today's set of problems. perhaps the solution to _this_
huge problem in the art of programming is precisely to lose control over
source code once created? it is perfectly evident that creating a good
language that would save people a lot of effort if they only learned to
use it instead of seeing their job security in creating yet another silly
new language in order to have people repeat all the previous effort in
_their_ particular environment. job security in software didn't use to
take much effort: just be a moron, and you could always get re-hired to
fix your own bugs, such as the Year 2000 SNAFU.
as long as there no point in doing it right the first time, there is no
need for a community to help do just that, and therefore, there is no
community except where people who _want_ to do it right the first time
congregate in their free time. the communities that are "taken over" by
the free software people is what professional software people should have
had the wherewithal to create long ago, like the medical and legal
professions have done. perhaps it's the reckless irresponsibility of the
whole industry that is reflected in the fact that people get together in
communities on their free time. most other organizations that attract
people in their free time are also objections to some perceived chaos. I
mean, when Bill Gates can swindle and lie people billions, who wants to
be honest and upright except "lunatics"? there's no job security in
being ripped off by the better hoodlum.
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century
Erik Naggum
| Now what has RMS contributed to the "software development profession?"
*snicker* 19, was it? when he was your age, he had serious work at MIT
published under his name.
| If anything, he feels that those in the software development profession
| should not be paid salaries like those in medical, law, scientific and
| engineering professions when the cost of education, level of challenge,
| amount of work, and intelligence requirements are equal if not greater.
this is your moronic interpretation, not his actual message nor his idea.
did you know that agreements (in the legal profession) are not copyright?
how can lawyers make money when the results of their work aren't theirs
to control? did you know that in the medical profession, the whole idea
is to publish your findings, methods, etc, and to constantly contribute
to the sum total of experience in the field? how can they make money
when they don't own and control the methods they use? engineers publish
their creativity in the form of patents, which anyone is free to read and
improve upon, but if you use it without serious improvement, you get to
pay for that benefit. in the medical, legal, scientific, and engineering
disciplines, as well as in the arts, the _rule_ is to publish to survive.
any author can go read Shakespear and quote at will, he doesn't need to
pay a personal license to watch professional actors perform the play for
him. there's a commencement speech at MIT to the class of '98 that is
now on the hit lists all over the world, where Bass Lehrman (sp?) reads
the text from that speech to some nice background music. a lot of music
is built from _sampling_. all over the place, credits are payed and
people can use available material. the software industry is _different_
from all the other industries. we behave as if we are hardware people,
with vested interests in the secrecy of the drawings of the chips, but we
aren't. software is written by people, for other people.
what makes you think a software professional (with a license from the
government or a trade union to write software in mission-critical systems
or software that affects the general public) would not have a full day of
work _without_ having to write the same code that others had done a
thousands of times before him? imagine what the other professions would
be like if each professional kept his findings secret and refused to
share them with his peers. something is wrong in the software industry.
however, the solution is not to remove control from the author. the
solution is to make source available to conscientious practitioners and
good students, as rewards for being the future of a profession. after
all, there's a reason for the time-delay of patents and the time-delay of
publication of important methods and the association of remarkable
results with companies or people -- it's the time in which the results
are supposed to pay back. after it has funded its own creation and laid
the grounds for future research, soceity as a whole no longer benefits
from complete control over the results -- and thus patents cannot last
for more than a few years. the software industry as a whole basically
doesn't believe it _has_ any value except in its secrets. after having
made a living in this industry since 1983, I know that that is just plain
false. the value in our industry lies in our ability to solve very real
problems for people who have ailing systems, just like people have ailing
health that need doctors to keep from being fatal and companies have
ailing relationships that need a lawyer to avoid outright conflict.
| If he (and his minions like Klaus) insist that honest, well-meaning
| companies like (for example) Franz are hoarders and putting their users
| in bondage because they are a bunch of intelligent people working their
| butts off to ship a high-quality product and to support it properly while
| not putting the lifestyles they have earned in unnecessary jeopardy, then
| he is far more guilty than I of lifestyle-attacking.
RMS doesn't attack anyone's lifestyle. he wants freedom to live his own
way and that those who join him should be able to do so, freely and
without being forced to accept other views, like yours. that's the
freedom you are very strongly opposed to giving him. now, _who_ is the
raving lunatic in this picture if not you?
please don't confuse Klaus Schilling and Richard M. Stallman. the former
is a certified lunatic. the latter is a brilliant man with ideas that
run counter to the predominant views, but he is not a lunatic because of
that.
my suggestion is: grow up or shut up, Christopher R. Barry.
Christopher R. Barry
> | No, selling documentation under profitable terms for your software is not
> | okay with R.M.Stallman, whom last year attacked Tim Oreilly at a
> | conference he was invited to for not making his documentation "free".
>
> he criticized the fact that the sources weren't available, not that the
> books were sold for a profit.
I did not say that he criticized that the books were sold for a
profit. He very much believes in the right that something can be sold
for profit. I said he criticized the selling of documentation under
"profitable terms." You can find out the basic deal with all of this
at <http://www.ora.com/ask_tim/orabooks_os.html>.
> | In many cases, selling only documentation or support or a configuration
> | tool is not a realistic way to have job security either, ...
>
> that isn't one of his points, either. you have obviously not noticed,
> but the idea is to have people pay for the creation of software, but not
> for being prohibited from using it, which is what the very prohibitive
> licenses from companies like Microsoft are all about. striking the right
> balance between sharing development costs and licensing to consumers is
> the really tough job here.
Yes, "really tough" in your own words. "Impossible in many cases" or
"no real solution yet found" in my opinion. From the GNU Manifesto:
"Won't programmers starve?"
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us
cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making
faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives
standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something
else.
But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's
implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers
cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing.
The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be
possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much
as now.
And then there is:
"Shouldn't a programmer be able to ask for a reward for his creativity?"
There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to
maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are
destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today
are based on destruction.
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of
it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the
ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth
that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate
choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate
destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to
become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become
poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or,
the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if
everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for
one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's
creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or
part of that creativity.
Now RMS is saying a "good citizen" does not use "destructive means" to
become wealthier. And since Franz, Autodesk, and myriad other
companies use such "destructive means", their employees are thus not
"good citizens" according to RMS. I'd say that's an attack, if I ever
saw one.
> while mankind creates communities and tries to solve huge
> problems, programmers are obsessing about the execution time and
> internal representation of LENGTH on strings, just to take a
> random sampling from today's set of problems. perhaps the
> solution to _this_ huge problem in the art of programming is
> precisely to lose control over source code once created?
Gee, perhaps. But that's not going to happen any time soon, and there
are people that need to have good paying jobs and security now, and
students that will need to soon.
Christopher
Christopher R. Barry
> * cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)
> | Now what has RMS contributed to the "software development profession?"
>
> *snicker* 19, was it? when he was your age, he had serious work at MIT
> published under his name.
Like what?
> | If anything, he feels that those in the software development profession
> | should not be paid salaries like those in medical, law, scientific and
> | engineering professions when the cost of education, level of challenge,
> | amount of work, and intelligence requirements are equal if not greater.
>
> this is your moronic interpretation, not his actual message nor
> his idea.
Guess it bears repeating [GNU Manifesto: "Won't programmers starve?"]:
The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be
possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much
as now.
This directly supports my "moronic interpretation" stated above.
> did you know that agreements (in the legal profession) are not copyright?
> how can lawyers make money when the results of their work aren't theirs
> to control?
Because they charge $200 an hour producing the results of their
work. Yes, I know what contract programming is. I know that this is
what you do for a living. Not all programmers can be contract
programmers, nor do they all desire to be. Nor should this be the only
way to get money programming.
> did you know that in the medical profession, the whole idea is to
> publish your findings, methods, etc, and to constantly contribute
> to the sum total of experience in the field? how can they make
> money when they don't own and control the methods they use?
Often active research in the medical profession goes hand-in-hand with
the daily practice of cutting open peoples chests and heads and
billing their insurance companies $200,000 to do it and billing them
$7 for a pill of Aspirin.
And in pharmaceuticals, companies patent drugs people need to live,
and their insurance companies get to pick up the bulk of the
exorbitant tab, while the patients get to pick up a co-pay that in the
case of terminal illnesses can also lead to exorbitant costs.
> engineers publish their creativity in the form of patents, which
> anyone is free to read and improve upon, but if you use it without
> serious improvement, you get to pay for that benefit.
If the technology will even be licensed to you by its owner.
> what makes you think a software professional (with a license from the
> government or a trade union to write software in mission-critical systems
> or software that affects the general public) would not have a full day of
> work _without_ having to write the same code that others had done a
> thousands of times before him?
Okay, show me how it would work then. (I agree that in utopian society
that this should not be the case.)
> imagine what the other professions would be like if each
> professional kept his findings secret and refused to share them
> with his peers. something is wrong in the software industry.
Not all other professions are based on producing findings.
> however, the solution is not to remove control from the author. the
> solution is to make source available to conscientious practitioners and
> good students, as rewards for being the future of a profession.
Yeah, and how/when is that going to really be done?
> after all, there's a reason for the time-delay of patents and the
> time-delay of publication of important methods and the association
> of remarkable results with companies or people -- it's the time in
> which the results are supposed to pay back. after it has funded
> its own creation and laid the grounds for future research, soceity
> as a whole no longer benefits from complete control over the
> results -- and thus patents cannot last for more than a few years.
They last 20 (or 17?) years in the United States. For many kinds of
computer technology, that's a century. For algorithms (which I think
should not be patentable), this is better than nothing. (Looks like
the patent on the LZW compression algorithm will expire soon, if it
didn't already.)
> the software industry as a whole basically doesn't believe it
> _has_ any value except in its secrets.
There are plenty of companies that will provide source under
restricted terms. You have the sources to Franz's Allegro CL. I have
the sources to a lot (all?) of Symbolic's Genera 8.3. Microsoft makes
the NT sources available to students at certain universities. Most
(all?) Unix companies have source licensing available.
> | If he (and his minions like Klaus) insist that honest, well-meaning
> | companies like (for example) Franz are hoarders and putting their users
> | in bondage because they are a bunch of intelligent people working their
> | butts off to ship a high-quality product and to support it properly while
> | not putting the lifestyles they have earned in unnecessary jeopardy, then
> | he is far more guilty than I of lifestyle-attacking.
>
> RMS doesn't attack anyone's lifestyle. he wants freedom to live his own
> way and that those who join him should be able to do so, freely and
> without being forced to accept other views, like yours.
Really???
"Shouldn't a programmer be able to ask for a reward for his creativity?"
There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to
maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are
destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today
are based on destruction.
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of
it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the
ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth
that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate
choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate
destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to
become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become
poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or,
the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if
everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for
one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's
creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or
part of that creativity.
> that's the freedom you are very strongly opposed to giving him.
> now, _who_ is the raving lunatic in this picture if not you?
Him.
> the latter is a brilliant man with ideas that run counter to the
> predominant views, but he is not a lunatic because of that.
Just have ideas that run counter to the predominant views do not make
you a lunatic, but some of his ideas do.
> my suggestion is: grow up or shut up, Christopher R. Barry.
Well, perhaps I'll be "grown up" when I'm buying 100% of my own food
and 100% supporting myself, and there's not a very good chance of that
happening (though not 0% chance) if I'm trying to make a living
writing GPL'ed or similar code (and not a contract programmer).
Christopher
thi
> Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:
>
> > * cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)
> > |
> > | If anything, he feels that those in the software development profession
> > | should not be paid salaries like those in medical, law, scientific and
> > | engineering professions when the cost of education, level of challenge,
> > | amount of work, and intelligence requirements are equal if not greater.
> >
> > this is your moronic interpretation, not his actual message nor
> > his idea.
>
> Guess it bears repeating [GNU Manifesto: "Won't programmers starve?"]:
>
> The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be
> possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much
> as now.
>
> This directly supports my "moronic interpretation" stated above.
it only supports the numerical (salary) side of your argument, and not really
directly. the moron nature actually resides with the rest of your argument,
which compares the rigor of those other disciplines with the relatively ad hoc
methods and requirements found in the average software shop. c'mon get real.
> > what makes you think a software professional (with a license from
> > the government or a trade union to write software in mission-
> > critical systems or software that affects the general public)
> > would not have a full day of work _without_ having to write the
> > same code that others had done a thousands of times before him?
>
> Okay, show me how it would work then. (I agree that in utopian society
> that this should not be the case.)
often people post code (or pointers) to newsgroups. then other people
use the code, without having to rewrite it. (but usually people first
argue about the code. :-) there's this operating system, been around
since 1991, that has been successful under this model.
> > imagine what the other professions would be like if each
> > professional kept his findings secret and refused to share them
> > with his peers. something is wrong in the software industry.
>
> Not all other professions are based on producing findings.
you're getting warmer..... there are professions where the value of the
work lies in service rendered rather than product made.
> > however, the solution is not to remove control from the author. the
> > solution is to make source available to conscientious practitioners and
> > good students, as rewards for being the future of a profession.
>
> Yeah, and how/when is that going to really be done?
see above on posting code to newsgroups.
> > the software industry as a whole basically doesn't believe it
> > _has_ any value except in its secrets.
>
> There are plenty of companies that will provide source under
> restricted terms. You have the sources to Franz's Allegro CL. I have
> the sources to a lot (all?) of Symbolic's Genera 8.3. Microsoft makes
> the NT sources available to students at certain universities. Most
> (all?) Unix companies have source licensing available.
is this "you" generalizable to "all people for all time henceforth"?
> > my suggestion is: grow up or shut up, Christopher R. Barry.
>
> Well, perhaps I'll be "grown up" when I'm buying 100% of my own food
> and 100% supporting myself, and there's not a very good chance of that
> happening (though not 0% chance) if I'm trying to make a living
> writing GPL'ed or similar code (and not a contract programmer).
your insecurities are understandable. relax. if you understand
programming you will do fine. the key is to keep munging that big piece
of funky code: yourself. let the old hackers hack in peace.
thi
Lars Marius Garshol
* Erik Naggum
|
| there's a commencement speech at MIT to the class of '98 that is now
| on the hit lists all over the world, where Bass Lehrman (sp?) reads
| the text from that speech to some nice background music.
It's Baz Luhrman, who incidentally also directed 'Romeo and Juliet' a
couple of years ago.
--Lars M.
Erik Naggum
you seem to live in a world where kids know everything and people twice
your age know nothing. if you want to underline this impression, please
keep quoting well-known texts to prove that you think your opponents form
their opinions out of ignorance of them.
| Now RMS is saying a "good citizen" does not use "destructive means" to
| become wealthier.
do you disagree with this? do you understand that _precise_ agreement on
what "destructive means" are is impossible to obtain in any society? and
why do you give your opponents so much control over your own opinions?
| And since Franz, Autodesk, and myriad other companies use such
| "destructive means", their employees are thus not "good citizens"
| according to RMS. I'd say that's an attack, if I ever saw one.
these are the ravings of paranoid lunatic.
| But that's not going to happen any time soon, and there are people that
| need to have good paying jobs and security now, and students that will
| need to soon.
when your shrink and you have worked out what you are _really_ afraid of,
let's get back to this discussion. until then, it is clear that you are
quite irrational and have lost basic contact with reality. let me just
say: you are not under attack by anyone. you are not in any present or
future danger of losing your livelihood. you are not in danger of being
unable to recover the costs of your education. at least not because of
the GPL or the FSF or RMS in particular. the changes you will observe in
society because of their activity will affect you only if you let them
and then only if you fail to respond rationally to them. and _that's_
what you have to work on.
and to make it harder for you to write me off as a free software lunatic:
I want access to source code, both to understand and to fix problems, and
I see no problem in signing license agreements to get this access, but I
have no desire to lose control over my own creations. therefore, I don't
publish any of my software under the GPL and I don't use GPL'ed source in
my own original work, but I also don't see any problems with working on
GPL'ed source with others. now, take your gripes to gnu.misc.discuss if
you have any other comments on free software, OK?
Bjørn Remseth
>
> Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:
>
> > * cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)
> > | Now what has RMS contributed to the "software development profession?"
> >
> > *snicker* 19, was it? when he was your age, he had serious work at MIT
> > published under his name.
>
> Like what?
http://www.ai.mit.edu/publications/pubsDB/pubsDB/search lists
Heuristic Techniques in Computer Aided Circuit Analysis
By Gerald Jay Sussman and Richard Matthew Stallman AI memo 328,
March 1975, 28 pages Reference: Also published in ``IEEE Transactions
on Circuits and Systems'', vol. CAS-22, no. 11,
November 1975.
... but I'm not certain that this was his earliest work, nor that he
was nineteen at the time (if he was nineteen in 75 that would make him
about forty-three this year, which may or may not be true, I don't
know).
> Well, perhaps I'll be "grown up" when I'm buying 100% of my own food
> and 100% supporting myself, and there's not a very good chance of that
> happening (though not 0% chance) if I'm trying to make a living
> writing GPL'ed or similar code (and not a contract programmer).
RMS is a fundamentalist. Nothing wrong with that. He believes in what
he does, and a whole lot of good has come out of his work. I wish more
people in this world could say the same.
However, although many of us use free software every day, and
contribute to free software as much as we can, of course we also have
to make living. In practice, for most of us, this means that not all
the software we write can be free, at least not all the time. That's
it & that's that.
Pierre R. Mai
> > did you know that agreements (in the legal profession) are not copyright?
> > how can lawyers make money when the results of their work aren't theirs
> > to control?
>
> Because they charge $200 an hour producing the results of their
> work. Yes, I know what contract programming is. I know that this is
> what you do for a living. Not all programmers can be contract
> programmers, nor do they all desire to be. Nor should this be the only
> way to get money programming.
a) Not all in the legal profession work as "contract lawyers", by a
wide margin. At least in the countries I'm accustomed to, there
are many, many members of the legal profression who work as
salaried employees of corporations, public institutions and
international institutions. They don't seem to have a problem with
the uncopyrightable status of their work. (BTW: I have never heard
of lawyers who charge solely based on an hourly basis. Most of the
cash seems to come in based on the value of whatever is under
dispute, at least in civil lawsuits.).
b) Even if in the future you could only work as a contract programmer,
why do you feel you would have the right to complain about this?
There are all sorts of professions and jobs that only offer
employment in one form or another, where the nature of the work
requires a certain work regime. Do you feel that it's wrong and
evil that judges can mostly only find employed by the state (in
some countries)? Or that there are few contract coal-miners? If
you don't like the way things work in a certain sector, then don't
enter that sector.
c) That GPL'd software can only support contract programmers, is IMHO a
myth. To the contrary, I think that GPL'd software offers much more
opportunities for salaried programmers (take for example the swiftly
growing numbers of salaried programmers being employed by Red Hat, VA
Research, SuSE, Precission Insight, etc. for developing and working
on GPL'd or otherwise free software) than it offers new opportunities
for contract programmers (I'm not saying that GPL'd software is
directly harmful to contract programmers, which clearly is not the
case).
Also, I simply cannot understand the underlying reasons for your
ravings about RMS and GPL'd software. As you say yourself, it seems
to be motivated by fear for your own livelyhood. Well, fear is
rarely a good adviser to follow, since fear is anti-thetical to
rational thought. Currently, I'd argue, most free software is
still supported in large part by many programmers that work on it in
their free time. For whatever reasons they do what they are doing, I
don't think that they'll stop doing it, just because you say this will
put you out of work.
And should free software really take off as a general way of developing
software, then the society will have to find ways to compensate those
doing the development, since the free time of all programmers will
probably not suffice. In this case you will have no problem making a
living, I'd think.
Or if you believe that free software will never really take off, you
again have no problem.
So it seems your raving can never achieve anything positive for
yourself.
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre Mai <pm...@acm.org> PGP and GPG keys at your nearest Keyserver
"One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-
bashing." [Microsoft memo, see http://www.opensource.org/halloween1.html]
Joachim Achtzehnter
>
> >>>>> "Joachim" == Joachim Achtzehnter <joa...@kraut.bc.ca> writes:
> Joachim>
> Joachim> from C to Lisp was problematic
>
The version of the manual I looked at contained this statement:
Calling Lisp functions from C is sometimes possible, but is rather
hackish.
> Also, doesn't ILU require threads?
No, it doesn't. The mapping for ACL3 is single-threaded, the one for
ACL4 and ACL5 is multi-threaded, both are possible.
Kent M Pitman
> cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
>
> > > did you know that agreements (in the legal profession) are not copyright?
> > > how can lawyers make money when the results of their work aren't theirs
> > > to control?
I'd like to see a cite to law for this to believe it true. I don't
recall seeing any exception in the IP law for contracts to not be
copyrightable. If you buy those EZ-forms from office supply stores,
they're copyrighted.
For those who are curious to poke about in it, US copyright law is at
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/
My law page contains additional pointers, though some are a little stale.
http://world.std.com/~pitman/law.html
Erik Naggum
| did you know that agreements (in the legal profession) are not copyright?
| how can lawyers make money when the results of their work aren't theirs
| to control?
* Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com>
| I'd like to see a cite to law for this to believe it true.
there's no law that says this. you might think of the technical legal
definition of inalienable copyright unless otherwise relinquished, but
there is no meaningful difference between a theoretical Bern-style,
intrinsic copyright that is never invoked and a non-existing copyright.
the situation is this: lawyers do not affix their agreements with either
the name of the author or any other information that could aid in the
discovery of the intrinsic copyright holder
| I don't recall seeing any exception in the IP law for contracts to not be
| copyrightable.
they are copyrightable, all right, they just aren't copyrighted.
| If you buy those EZ-forms from office supply stores, they're copyrighted.
they they're making a business out of selling the text, and it makes a
lot of sense to copyright it. never signed an EZ-form contract when I
took on a contract for a client, however. usually, we're talking about
pages and pages of custom text. since I have myself exploited the fact
that I can't get sued by a previous client for using the formulations in
a contract (other than to break confidientiality clauses, but that's
beside the point), I also fail to see what _purpose_ a copyright could
have had.
Matt Curtin
Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> said:
Kent> Under US law, copyright is said to attach and is in existence
Kent> regardless of registration or notice.
I believe this applies to any member nation of the Berne Convention,
not just the US.
--
Matt Curtin cmcu...@interhack.net http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/
Kent M Pitman
>
> * Erik Naggum
> | did you know that agreements (in the legal profession) are not copyright?
> | how can lawyers make money when the results of their work aren't theirs
> | to control?
>
> * Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com>
> | I'd like to see a cite to law for this to believe it true.
>
> there's no law that says this. you might think of the technical legal
> definition of inalienable copyright unless otherwise relinquished, but
> there is no meaningful difference between a theoretical Bern-style,
> intrinsic copyright that is never invoked and a non-existing copyright.
I don't agree. A right exists whether it is invoked. One does not
relinquish one's right just by failing to enforce it. In practice,
the difference is that while people may use things that others don't
go after them for, the situation when they do is that the infringer
is just lucky they don't get sued because the infringed retains the
continuous right to sue even after having tolerated the abuse.
> the situation is this: lawyers do not affix their agreements with either
> the name of the author or any other information that could aid in the
> discovery of the intrinsic copyright holder
>
> | I don't recall seeing any exception in the IP law for contracts to not be
> | copyrightable.
>
> they are copyrightable, all right, they just aren't copyrighted.
Again I don't agree. Under US law, copyright is said to attach and is
in existence regardless of registration or notice. Registration and
notice merely enhance one's right to specific recourse in case of an
infringement, and may make the difference, for example, between
getting "statutory" (i.e., default minimum) damages for each
infringement of a properly registered work and "merely" going after
someone for "actual" (i.e., documentable loss of actual dollars)
damages, for example. The threshold of proof of damages is less
in the registered case. And in the registered case you can sue for
attorney's fees, so it's cheaper to go after someone; but that doesn't
mean you can't pay an attorney yourself if you want in the other cas.e
In either case, the party retains the right to sue to have the infringer
desist from the infringement.
Copyright is like any other right--it sits there waiting for you to use
it. And it doesn't whither for lack of use. It just waits paitently.
At least, that's my understanding.
> | If you buy those EZ-forms from office supply stores, they're copyrighted.
>
> they they're making a business out of selling the text, and it makes a
> lot of sense to copyright it. never signed an EZ-form contract when I
> took on a contract for a client, however. usually, we're talking about
> pages and pages of custom text. since I have myself exploited the fact
> that I can't get sued by a previous client for using the formulations in
> a contract (other than to break confidientiality clauses, but that's
> beside the point), I also fail to see what _purpose_ a copyright could
> have had.
If it's expensive to come up with the wording of a contract, you might want
to keep someone from using your text literally in theirs. There's a strong
potential both to be infringed and to find the infringers on the web.
A lot of people don't want to write their own web-legal-ese and
prefer just to lift someone else's.
Erik Naggum
what can I say? my sources are a top-notch businessman, it was confirmed
by an intellectual property lawyer I have known for many years, and even
reconfirmed by the lawyer who drafted my contracts with the sponsoring
Taiwanese University and IBM for my work both here and in the U.S.: the
text of agreements is not copyrighted, and lawyers _want_ to be able to
use the text of other lawyers' contracts without listing a whole bunch of
sources or paying fees for the wording. (sold to the general public,
other interests in the text come into consideration, of course.)
I'm sorry I cannot do anything but appeal to "lower authorities", not
actually having any interest in paying for a lawyer to dig up actual
references, but in this case, I think you're overreacting. please ask
some intellectual property lawyers whether they protect the wording of
their agreements, and whether there is a customary, if not legal,
understanding that agreements are supposed to be part of the legal
framework. I may have to remind you that the text of laws, etc, isn't
copyrighted, either, and in this case, there's a law that says it in most
countries. the Berne convention does not apply to government property in
the first place.
Kent M Pitman
> please ask
> some intellectual property lawyers whether they protect the wording of
> their agreements, and whether there is a customary, if not legal,
> understanding that agreements are supposed to be part of the legal
> framework.
Nothing you say here is inconsistent with what I said other than the
hint that a right is lost in the process of not asserting that right.
I agree that lawyers often do not protect their agreements, but I
believe that largely this is for two reasons. One is that such rights
don't need protection since (at least to some extent) they are there
whether or not asserted; the assserting is done at the time of
enforcement, not of creation. [A good many copyright pages on the
net, perhaps thanks to .shtml, are copyrighted, though.] The other is
that lawyers, like CS people, are often specialists. In my experience,
a typical lawyer is about as likely to be an expert in Intellectual
Property law as a typical compiler writer is to be an expert in
user interface. Both useful skills, but not necessarily overlapping,
and there's only so much time in the world, so people make do with
what they have time to... So I'm going to make do with this as a response
and drop this thread. The purpose of my remark was to stake out a position,
not to win an argument. I imagine yours was the same. I think we've
done that.
Erik Naggum
| hint that a right is lost in the process of not asserting that right.
um, no such hint was intended, but I think that if you cannot in any way
experience a difference between two things, they are the same. in this
case, a right never asserted/invoked and no right at all. if you want to
insist that the right _may_ be asserted if things change, I could just as
well argue that politicians may change which rights may be challenged in
court. incidentally, that latter, scary thought is probably the worst
way in which not asserting a right may cause it to be lost...
Christopher R. Barry
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:
> | Now RMS is saying a "good citizen" does not use "destructive means" to
> | become wealthier.
>
> do you disagree with this?
No, but I disagree with RMS's definition of "destructive means", which
I feel he defined well enough in the text of his I quoted. Anyone
writing software that is not GPL'ed or freer - allowing those you have
distributed your software to the exact same freedoms that you the
author and copyright holder enjoy - and is making money off of it, is
using so-called "destructive means" in the words of RMS. I don't think
this is a very sane or reasonable view. I don't think you think it is
either, but you wish to avoid acknowledging or directly addressing the
issue that this is what he is so plainly saying in part of the GNU
Manifesto.
If one is to accept all of RMS's views as correct then statements like
"Allegro CL is proprietary, and thus useless" which triggered this
whole thread are not unreasonable. I don't think RMS himself would
call something like Allegro CL useless, but he might call it unusable,
and certainly wouldn't give it the time of day no matter what the
quality or pricing was even if the pricing was $0 for commercial use
and the quality was, well, what it actually is; Because of its
licensing in which Franz utilizes "destructive means" to obtain wealth
and security.
> do you understand that _precise_ agreement on what "destructive
> means" are is impossible to obtain in any society?
This is no more relevant than that precise agreement over anything is
almost impossible to obtain in any society. People will be people. I
think if you took a vote in the professional community as a whole
whether or not RMS's usage of "destructive means" is correct, that the
majority would vote his definition is not correct.
> | And since Franz, Autodesk, and myriad other companies use such
> | "destructive means", their employees are thus not "good citizens"
> | according to RMS. I'd say that's an attack, if I ever saw one.
>
> these are the ravings of paranoid lunatic.
Since the above is essentially what RMS so plainly and unmistakably
said in the GNU Manifesto, I am in partial agreement with you.
> let me just say: you are not under attack by anyone. you are not
> in any present or future danger of losing your livelihood. you
> are not in danger of being unable to recover the costs of your
> education.
If you read carefully, you'll see I've never said such. I've only said
that _if_ I did as RMS saw as being unsinful and the only correct way
to do things, then this would possibly be true. I don't yet plan on
doing everything RMS's way.
> and to make it harder for you to write me off as a free software
> lunatic: I want access to source code, both to understand and to
> fix problems, and I see no problem in signing license agreements
> to get this access, but I have no desire to lose control over my
> own creations. therefore, I don't publish any of my software
> under the GPL and I don't use GPL'ed source in my own original
> work
You thus restrict those you distribute your software to from having
the same freedoms that you have. This is very wrong to RMS. I don't
think this is wrong. You, by your own admitted actions, must not think
it is wrong either lest you be a hypocrite. But in your reply, which I
know is coming since you _do_ love getting the last word in, you will
either elide this text or just spew some really high-content insult
like "these are the ravings of a paranoid lunatic." You'll choose not
to directly respond to this, because you don't wish to accept that
some of my criticisms of RMS are very valid.
Free software has its place. The world is better because of it. But
not all software in the world should be RMS "free." At least not yet,
nor for some time.
pm...@acm.org (Pierre R. Mai) writes:
> Also, I simply cannot understand the underlying reasons for your
> ravings about RMS and GPL'd software. As you say yourself, it seems
> to be motivated by fear for your own livelyhood.
No, I don't have fear for my own livelihood because I am not going to
necessarily do things as RMS sees fit. If I did, then there would
perhaps be risk that there otherwise wouldn't be.
> So it seems your raving can never achieve anything positive for
> yourself.
I couldn't agree more. I think I'll let Erik get the last word in on
this and be done with it, unless his usual provocativeness is
unusually felt, which it won't be if he just calls me a lunatic and
goes off writing 5k of text that doesn't in particular criticize what
I and not RMS is actually saying.
Christopher
Christopher R. Barry
> cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
>
> >
> > Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:
> >
> > > * cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)
> > > | Now what has RMS contributed to the "software development profession?"
> > >
> > > *snicker* 19, was it? when he was your age, he had serious work at MIT
> > > published under his name.
> >
> > Like what?
>
>
> http://www.ai.mit.edu/publications/pubsDB/pubsDB/search lists
>
> Heuristic Techniques in Computer Aided Circuit Analysis
> By Gerald Jay Sussman and Richard Matthew Stallman AI memo 328,
> March 1975, 28 pages Reference: Also published in ``IEEE Transactions
> on Circuits and Systems'', vol. CAS-22, no. 11,
> November 1975.
>
> ... but I'm not certain that this was his earliest work, nor that he
> was nineteen at the time (if he was nineteen in 75 that would make him
> about forty-three this year, which may or may not be true, I don't
> know).
He was born March 16, 1953 in New York, New York. Erik is just blowing
hot air out his butt, unless he wants to back his claim.
> However, although many of us use free software every day, and
> contribute to free software as much as we can, of course we also have
> to make living. In practice, for most of us, this means that not all
> the software we write can be free, at least not all the time. That's
> it & that's that.
<Me-too>Yes, this is what I have been saying. I could not agree
more.</Me-too>
Christopher
Patrick A. O'Donnell
> I don't agree. A right exists whether it is invoked. One does not
> relinquish one's right just by failing to enforce it.
> is just lucky they don't get sued because the infringed retains the
> continuous right to sue even after having tolerated the abuse.
Perhaps negligence will not precisely _relinquish_ one's right, but
the doctrine of laches can be used to prevent one from gaining remedy.
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:
> I may have to remind you that the text of laws, etc, isn't
> copyrighted, either, and in this case, there's a law that says it in most
> countries.
Not that I think it's good, but in the US there is no bar to the
states or local governments claiming copyright in their writings,
including laws. Only the federal government is so prevented.
- Patrick O'Donnell
p...@alum.mit.edu
Christopher C Stacy
> r...@tyrfing.ifi.uio.no (Bjørn Remseth) writes:
> > cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
> > > > * cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)
> > > > | Now what has RMS contributed to the "software development profession?"
> > > > *snicker* 19, was it? when he was your age, he had serious work at MIT
> > > > published under his name.
> > > Like what?
> > Heuristic Techniques in Computer Aided Circuit Analysis
> > By Gerald Jay Sussman and Richard Matthew Stallman AI memo 328,
> > March 1975, 28 pages Reference: Also published in ``IEEE Transactions
> > on Circuits and Systems'', vol. CAS-22, no. 11,
> > November 1975.
> > ... but I'm not certain that this was his earliest work, nor that he
> > was nineteen at the time (if he was nineteen in 75 that would make him
> > about forty-three this year, which may or may not be true, I don't
> > know).
>
> He was born March 16, 1953 in New York, New York. Erik is just blowing
> hot air out his butt, unless he wants to back his claim.
I seem to recal that RMS graduated from Harvard (Magna in physics) at age 16,
and around that time (actually, before graduating) started teaching himself
computers and hacking at the MIT AI Lab.
I don't know if he was 19 or not, but very early on, RMS had certainly
done significant work in operating system design. For example:
"The BOJ/JOB Device: A Mechanism for Implementing Non-Standard Devices"
Seriff, Haverty, Stallman; September 18,1974.
It's a little hard to tell from the title, but the BOJ/JOB device was
part of ITS (the PDP-10 operating system on which EMACS was invented).
This paper is about a generic IO protocol that allowed user-mode
programs to function as device drivers. It was the basis of, among
other things, the system's transparent networked file system which
implemented exact system call semantics (in particular, partial and
interrupted IO with user-mode PC validation) over the network.
I don't recall if that was the first really significant thing that RMS
contributed to, and I am not at home so don't have access to my library.
My personal knowledge of any of this does not go back before 1979.
I'm not really sure what all this flaming is about.
Kucera, Rich
> I'm not really sure what all this flaming is about.
Neither am I, and I do feel like an ass, but this is good news:
after a tiny bit of exploring I found that there's an OLE subdirectory
in the ACL 5 (lite also) release with WORKING examples of how to get out
of Lispworld with non-client-specific drivers (at least in Windows)
without
having to buy Orblink.
This means, for example, you can get out to a Java tier running as a
COM server doing Oracle sql*net drivers, or to the superior xml4j XML
support,
to the Java CORBA support, JavaMail, or whatever they decide to load
into
Java next, you can get to while we wait for Lisp to catch up. For
free.
Note to mention COM servers based on any other platform.
Here's the readme file from the samples subdir under ole which is a
concise
listing of possibilities:
Sample01 lisp client, non-lisp in-proc server, IDispatch interface
Lisp uses an autotool to drive the Microsoft Calendar Control
as a
windowless object.
Sample02 lisp client, non-lisp local server, IDispatch interface
Lisp uses an autotool to drive the Microsoft Internet
Explorer.
Sample03 lisp client, lisp server, IDispatch interface
Lisp server implements an automaton with a custom
DispInterface.
Lisp client allocates and manipulates objects on the server.
Sample04 Visual basic client, lisp local server, IDispatch interface
Lisp server implements an automaton with a custom
DispInterface.
Visual Basic client allocates and manipulates objects on the
server.
Sample05 Visual C++ client, lisp inproc server, Custom interface.
Lisp server implements an object with a custom interface.
Visual C++ client allocates and validates an object.
Sample06 Visual Basic client, lisp inproc server, custom DispInterface.
Visual Basic client allocates and manipulates objects on the
server.
Fernando
<Klaus.S...@home.ivm.de> wrote:
>> Hey Dave, I'm just 19. I'm still alone and in a 1-bedroom apartment (no
>> family+wife).
>
>And if you're very lucky and clever, you will stay alone.
OK, why?
>Celibacy is the one and only true lifestyle for wise people like Plato
>who would have programmed in Scheme, the most platonic language.
;-DDD
>It's their fault if they love the flesh more than the spirit.
Klaus needs a nice girlfriend...
>Home, family and material wealth are evils that keep people bound to
>the relentlessly turning wheel of Sansara. Celibacy is the best way
>to salvation.
=:-O Maybe a lunatic, but a cultivated one...
//-----------------------------------------------
// Fernando Rodriguez Romero
//
// frr at mindless dot com
//------------------------------------------------
Klaus Schilling
> On 18 Jun 1999 23:31:51 +0200, Klaus Schilling
> <Klaus.S...@home.ivm.de> wrote:
>
>
> >> Hey Dave, I'm just 19. I'm still alone and in a 1-bedroom apartment (no
> >> family+wife).
> >
> >And if you're very lucky and clever, you will stay alone.
>
> OK, why?
>
In order to save your soul from decay and corruption.
>
> >It's their fault if they love the flesh more than the spirit.
>
> Klaus needs a nice girlfriend...
Only primitive people want a girlfriend, they are too feeble for
celibacy. Girlfriends are evil creatures that just want to keep
people away from the Emacs.
Klaus Schilling
Vassil Nikolov
Klaus Schilling wrote:
[...]
> Only primitive people want a girlfriend, they are too feeble for
> celibacy. Girlfriends are evil creatures that just want to keep
> people away from the Emacs.
Does this also pertain to {opposite-sex,same-sex} boyfriends?
To wives/husbands?
(Just curious.)
--- Vassil.
Vassil Nikolov
Permanent forwarding e-mail: vnik...@poboxes.com
For more: http://www.poboxes.com/vnikolov
Abaci lignei --- programmatici ferrei.
Klaus Schilling
> On 1999-06-26 11:47 +0200,
> Klaus Schilling wrote:
>
> [...]
> > Only primitive people want a girlfriend, they are too feeble for
> > celibacy. Girlfriends are evil creatures that just want to keep
> > people away from the Emacs.
>
> Does this also pertain to {opposite-sex,same-sex} boyfriends?
> To wives/husbands?
Of course.
Klaus Schilling
Matt Curtin
Klaus Schilling <Klaus.S...@home.ivm.de> said:
Klaus> Only primitive people want a girlfriend, they are too feeble
Klaus> for celibacy. Girlfriends are evil creatures that just want to
Klaus> keep people away from the Emacs.
But what if you marry someone who maintains your Emacs installation
for you? :-)
Raymond Toy
Joachim> Raymond Toy <rt...@mindspring.com> writes:
>>
>> >>>>> "Joachim" == Joachim Achtzehnter <joa...@kraut.bc.ca> writes:
Joachim>
Joachim> Last time I looked cmucl's support for calls
Joachim> from C to Lisp was problematic
>>
>> In what way was it problematic?
Joachim> The version of the manual I looked at contained this statement:
Joachim> Calling Lisp functions from C is sometimes possible, but is rather
Joachim> hackish.
I see that now. I suppose it would be possible to add some
macros/functions to make calling Lisp from C a little bit easier. If
you're interested, I can probably help with these functions.
Ray
Lars Bjønnes
> >>>>> On 26 Jun 1999 11:47:20 +0200,
> Klaus Schilling <Klaus.S...@home.ivm.de> said:
>
> Klaus> Only primitive people want a girlfriend, they are too feeble
> Klaus> for celibacy. Girlfriends are evil creatures that just want to
> Klaus> keep people away from the Emacs.
>
> But what if you marry someone who maintains your Emacs installation
> for you? :-)
No need for that. XEmacs->Options->Manage Packages :-)
--
Lars
Bruce Tobin
Joachim Achtzehnter wrote:
> David Bakhash <ca...@bu.edu> writes:
> >
> > Joachim Achtzehnter <joa...@kraut.bc.ca> writes:
> >
> > > ILU's Lisp mapping also works on the MS Windows platform with both
> > > Allegro 3.x and 5.x.
> >
> > first try it out, using ACL5 and MS Windows, and _then_ you can say
> > this (above).
>
> Not only did I _try_ it out, my company is using ILU's Lisp mapping
> for ACL5 on NT as a mission-critical component of a production system
> that has a 7 digit price tag.
>
Yeah, but.. er.. didn't you WRITE the ACL/Win port of ILU's Lisp mapping?
Maybe I'm thinking of another Joachim Achtzehnter. Still, the above is
impressive, and good to know.
Joachim Achtzehnter
Whether or not I wrote it, how is this relevant to the above?
In any case, to answer your question: Starting with an existing Lisp
mapping for ILU 1.8 on ACL4/Unix, I made the necessary changes to get
it working with ACL3/Win and ILU 2.0alpha. This isn't quite the same
as "writing it". Also, given that this is free software, it shouldn't
come as a surpise that major users are also important contributors.