>Why didn't you say you could use Linux before? I'm working on a new release of >something, but it requires Motif.
Something seems a bit vague... could you give more details? O:-)
//----------------------------------------------- // Fernando Rodriguez Romero // // frr at mindless dot com //------------------------------------------------
Janos Blazi <jbl...@netsurf.de> wrote: > No. I think, that big and great bookshop in Frankfurt has no books on LISP > as the books are not asked for. In Germany there are some murky books on > LISP and you cannot get the classics. I found a copy of Graham in my > bookshop but it was a German translation which I do not buy on principle. > Sometimes the translator thinks that he can "improve" the book. Ordering the > original English Edition would take 8 weeks. I have ordered the German > version from the library of the university though.
Please get your logic straight. You say, "you cannot get the classics", and in the next sentence you say you could even get a German translation of Graham's ANSI CL?
I've got all my lisp books on very short notice, and I didn't have to go to book shop (hint, hint).
> And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can > major in computer science from a German university (including my own > unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language. > (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at all in > any language, but this is a different story.)
This tells us more about the state of German computer science education (and the same applies to Austrian CS education) than about the interest in lisp. There is interest in lisp and people are using it, or whom do you think the four lisp vendors sell their products?
Anyway, counting the books in book stores maybe measures the popularity of a programming language, but certainly neither its quality nor the amount of thought that went into its design. (And yes, we recently had a thread about quality vs popularity.)
* Janos Blazi wrote: > And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can > major in computer science from a German university (including my own > unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language. > (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at all in > any language, but this is a different story.)
I hate to keep this thread alive, but I think this is wrong: it's the *same* story. The same underlying problems in CS education cause both these symptoms. Majoring in CS without being able to write programs is about as bad as majoring in Physics without being able to solve simple differential equations, and it says something truly awful about the state of CS education, and not just in your university I'm sure.
Marco Antoniotti <marc...@parades.rm.cnr.it> writes: > While I admit that the lack of good published Lisp books on the > shelves of bookstores worldwide is a problem (Barnes and Nobles on > Astor Place in NY e.g. or on Shuttuck in Berkeley don't have much, but > Cody's on Telegraph in Berkeley carries the full array of "classics";
I was just at Cody's a few weeks ago. They had the 2 Graham books, but they didn't have the Keene book, nor AMOP, nor PAIP. They didn't have other rarer ones I've been keeping my eye out for either like OOP: The CLOS Perspective.
> Please get your logic straight. You say, "you cannot get the classics", > and in the next sentence you say you could even get a German translation > of Graham's ANSI CL?
I wanted to buy the English version. Of course I would never buy a TRANSLATION!! The proverb "TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE" should be taken very, very seriously! After all: Translations of such books are absolutely useless!
> they didn't have the Keene book, nor AMOP, nor PAIP. They didn't have > other rarer ones I've been keeping my eye out for either like OOP: The > CLOS Perspective.
The last one will be very difficult to get hold of, since it's been seriously out-of-print for quite some time. It also seems to be a rather popular book, in that noone seems to wish to part with it, thereby reducing the number of available copies via second-hand sources to epsilon, with epsilon being sufficiently close to 0 that I've been unable to locate a copy for a couple of years... :-(
Regs, Pierre.
-- Pierre Mai <p...@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]
Janos Blazi wrote: > And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can > major in computer science from a German university (including my own > unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language. > (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at all in > any language, but this is a different story.)
Actually, it's the same story. Universities are not trade schools. Moreover, they don't really try to weed-out people who are wasting space. In one respect, universities are a lot like the real world. No one else is looking out for what you should be learning/paying attention to. BTW - No one thinks that an undergraduate degree means all that much. At best, it means that you might be able to learn things in your supposed field of study.
It isn't lisp's fault, or your university's fault, that you didn't learn everything that you didn't get an education.
I think it is really the universities fault. I saw at my own university that they had always used PASCAL and so they had a lot work invested into it and had questions for the examinations e.t.c.
And they simply were not interested to introduce C for example (or any other language) as that would have meant a lot of work. This is my opinion as they say PASCAL is the best languge for beginners.
Janos Blazi
Andy Freeman <ana...@earthlink.net> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag: 7vg38c$bg...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> Janos Blazi wrote: > > And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And > you can > > major in computer science from a German university (including my own > > unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar > language. > > (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at > all in > > any language, but this is a different story.)
> Actually, it's the same story. Universities are not trade schools. > Moreover, they don't really try to weed-out people who are wasting > space. In one respect, universities are a lot like the real world. > No one else is looking out for what you should be learning/paying > attention to. BTW - No one thinks that an undergraduate degree > means all that much. At best, it means that you might be able > to learn things in your supposed field of study.
> It isn't lisp's fault, or your university's fault, that you didn't > learn everything that you didn't get an education.
In article <3819E9FC.CE227...@iname.com>, "Fernando D. Mato Mira" <matom...@iname.com> wrote:
> Rainer Joswig wrote:
> > "Stapelspeicher defekt".
> "Stapelspeicher"? Der steht `pop stack' im Worterbuch, `Stapel' bedeutet `stack' und `Speicher' bedeutet `storage' (?!) > Ich glaube sie meinen `_call_ stack'?
In article <lw66zpxhwn....@parades.rm.cnr.it>, Marco Antoniotti <marc...@parades.rm.cnr.it> wrote: > So, there are no books on Lisp in big bookstores in Framkfurt (or > somewhere else in Germany) and in the library of the University.
Go to Lehmanns in Hamburg/Germany. They have Lisp books and can help. Excellent service. I'm getting all my CS books (lots) there. Last time I looked they had about ten (!) copies of Graham's "Common Lisp". They have both, german and english editions. I have both, too.
Fachbuchhandlung für Informatik, Psychologie und Medizin. Direkt in der Innenstadt in Hamburg
Thx. I love that bookshop too (though I have never purchased any books there). And I love Hamburg. It is wonderful to walk from the wonderful Hotel in the Möckebergstraße to the bookshop and look what they have. But most unfortunately I live in Würzburg (600km? 500km?) and so it is not the next bookshop near me.
Janos Blazi
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag: joswig-3110991113190...@194.163.195.67...
> In article <lw66zpxhwn....@parades.rm.cnr.it>, Marco Antoniotti <marc...@parades.rm.cnr.it> wrote:
> > So, there are no books on Lisp in big bookstores in Framkfurt (or > > somewhere else in Germany) and in the library of the University.
> Go to Lehmanns in Hamburg/Germany. They have Lisp books and can help. > Excellent service. I'm getting all my CS books (lots) there. > Last time I looked they had about ten (!) copies of Graham's "Common Lisp". > They have both, german and english editions. I have both, too.
> Fachbuchhandlung für Informatik, Psychologie und Medizin. > Direkt in der Innenstadt in Hamburg
* Janos Blazi | So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some | outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart, if | he tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I | am probably really stupid.
if your concern is _actually_ decency, start with yourself, right now: you're the one responsible for the hostilities here at the moment. just look at yourself and what indecency YOU write, for crying out loud!
if you can't distinguish between DOING something stupid and BEING stupid, perhaps you are entirely justified in your own case, but I do distinguish between them, ALWAYS. smart people also do stupid things, but stop doing them when criticized or made aware of their mistakes. stupid people tend to want to PROVE that whatever they were doing was not stupid when they get any form of criticism, harsh or friendly alike, and keep doing them just to spite their criticizers. so if the shoe fits, wear it, but don't blame me for your hardship or your reactions, and above all: don't even _attempt_ to blame me for your very own personal negativity.
| Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
the Internet appears to work in Germany, too, and the last time I shipped goods to Germany, both the postal services and outfits like FedEx and DHL were in reputable operation. perhaps you are unaware of your ability to order books from any large bookstore in the U.S.? whatever your imagined problem, the real problems are easy to solve and immaterial to anyone who actually wants something to happen, as opposed to only wanting to whine and blame others for their sorry state of affairs.
refusing to take part in this advancing communications world is simply not smart, but I guess anyone's entitled to wait eight weeks just so he doesn't have to dial an international phone number or use a credit card or visit a web site or what have you. what they are not entitled to is pretend that this is anybody's _fault_ but their own or a huge conspiracy or whatever else makes it impossible to solve simple, straightforward, and merely practical problems.
just f.....g do it! how hard can it _be_?
#:Erik, who gets _really_ tired of whining losers anywhere in the world, thanks to the same advancing communications technology.
> Marco Antoniotti <marc...@parades.rm.cnr.it> writes:
> > While I admit that the lack of good published Lisp books on the > > shelves of bookstores worldwide is a problem (Barnes and Nobles on > > Astor Place in NY e.g. or on Shuttuck in Berkeley don't have much, but > > Cody's on Telegraph in Berkeley carries the full array of "classics";
> I was just at Cody's a few weeks ago. They had the 2 Graham books, but > they didn't have the Keene book, nor AMOP, nor PAIP. They didn't have > other rarer ones I've been keeping my eye out for either like OOP: The > CLOS Perspective.
All right, it was along shot. I was there in June and they had PAIP and "OOP: The CLOS Perspective", looks like somebody bought them :)
Anyway, my point was that (1) yes: it is hard to find (Common) Lisp books in bookstores (2) this is indeed a sign of the shrinking programmers' base, and (3) this is not an encumbrance to getting these books today, given that they are either available directly online or thorugh Amazon and friends.
Cheers
-- Marco Antoniotti =========================================== PARADES, Via San Pantaleo 66, I-00186 Rome, ITALY tel. +39 - 06 68 10 03 17, fax. +39 - 06 68 80 79 26 http://www.parades.rm.cnr.it/~marcoxa
On Sat, 30 Oct 1999 09:13:56 +0200, "Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> wrote:
Gareth McCaughan:
> > replied because (1) I like helping people and (2) when I see > > something good (like Lisp) being attacked, I like to defend it.
Janos Blazi: > O.K. There have always been heretics. When we look into the history of our > religion we see that heretics made the CHURCH clarify their positions and > the CHURCH was stronger after the heretics were defeated. (And as a
In its long history, Lisp had its heretics too. And the Lisp community did take their claims as occasions to clarify its position and to improve the language. So we can probably say that after decades of debates, Lisp is stronger now. But I guess those heretics were not newcomers.
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes: > | Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
> it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
It's even better than this: amazon.com has a subsidiary in Germany nowadays (amazon.de), which doesn't charge for shipping in Germany (and IIRC Austria and Switzerland as well), even for american or british books. And they are quite fast (the longest time I've yet encountered was 2-3 weeks, and often they are quite a bit faster than this, sometimes < 24h on foreign books!). And you don't get any trouble with german customs, since amazon handles all of that (your package is shipped from germany).
And amazon has most of the recommended CL books in their catalog, often with extensive reviews and user comments/reviews (the links below are not part of some partner program, so I won't get any money from this):
-- Pierre Mai <p...@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]
In article <autonomous-7vgs79/INN-2.2.1/bel...@broadway.news.is-europe.net>, "Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> wrote:
> I think it is really the universities fault.
I shouldn't have used the word "fault". I should have written that it isn't the university's problem that you didn't get a good education.
> And they simply were not interested to introduce C for example (or any other > language) as that would have meant a lot of work. This is my opinion as they > say PASCAL is the best languge for beginners.
Hmm, that "for beginners" might suggest to you that you need to learn other things for other purposes. Unless, of course, being a "beginner" is your goal....
> > | Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
> > it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
A few years ago I ordered a book at a university bookshop in Milan, Italy (exercise for Marco: from the "efficiency pattern" guess which library I'm referring to ;-) A month later I hadn't received the book yet. So I called the publisher and discovered that their warehouse was just a couple km away from the bookshop. I went there and I got the book, with a small discount. Needless to say, I am a happy Amazon customer:
Recently I ordered this book from Amazon, together with a stock market analysis book for a friend, and chose air mail as the shipping method. About four weeks later I received Amazon's box as expected. But when I opened it, I found four cute children books with such fascinating titles as "Everyone Poops", "Your Bellybutton", "The Runaway Bunny" and "The Hungry Caterpillar" :-)
From the shipping receipt it turned out that those books should have been sent to a lady in New York, and that someone at Amazon had probably swapped the boxes's contents. I guess the lady was a bit concerned of handing metaobject stuff to her children: no kid should do this at home :-)
I notified Amazon's customer support. In their prompt reply, they apologized about the problem. Since it would have been prohibitively expensive for me to return the children books, they told me to keep them as a gift and suggested to donate them to a school, which I did. Besides, they resent my books _by courier_ free of charge.
Long live globalization! Long live good customer support! Long live freedom of choice! :-)
Janos Blazi wrote: >> Yes, Erik tends to do this to people he perceives are saying >> stupid things. On the other hand, he happens to be one of the >> smartest people in c.l.l, and when he says something is stupid >> he's usually right, so you may find it's worth your while to >> get past the harshness and take some notice of the points he >> makes.
> So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some > outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart, if he > tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I am > probably really stupid.
No. None of the above.
I mean:
- Although Erik is sometimes rude, he is also sometimes extremely clever and insightful.
- If he tells you that you are saying something stupid, then you may well be doing so even if you are not yourself stupid.
>>> (4) >>> You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
>> He didn't. He said arguing about whether Lisp is dead is stupid >> and boring, and he's right.
> Yes, and this is the same as saying that I am stupid and boring. It is not > always the same but it is the sam in this context.
It's certainly not the same as saying that *you* are stupid and boring. (How could it be?) It's only the same as saying that *your article* was stupid and boring if the whole point of your article was to discuss the alleged death of Lisp. If that's so, then maybe the article *was* stupid and boring :-).
>> I find the topic of the alleged death of Lisp boring. But I >> replied because (1) I like helping people and (2) when I see >> something good (like Lisp) being attacked, I like to defend it.
> O.K. There have always been heretics. When we look into the history of our > religion we see that heretics made the CHURCH clarify their positions and > the CHURCH was stronger after the heretics were defeated. (And as a > byproduct, the heretics were eliminated, but this is another story.)
Heretics make the church stronger when they come up with new heretical ideas that provoke clearer theological thought. I don't think the 1,000,001st person to say "This whole God business is obvious rubbish" does a great deal to strengthen the church. It seems to me that starting yet another "Is Lisp Dead?" thread (OK, you didn't know it was Yet Another, but it was) is more like the latter than it is like the former.
>> You think the Harry Deutsch bookshop in Frankfurt doesn't have any >> Lisp books because Erik Naggum is rude sometimes? I don't understand.
> No. I think, that big and great bookshop in Frankfurt has no books on LISP > as the books are not asked for.
Unfortunately, that's probably true. Now, I wonder whether saying that Lisp is dead is likely to mean that *more* people will ask for Lisp books in the bookshops, or *less*? :-)
> (I'll visit Berlin next week and I'll take a look there at the big Kierpert > store that is atleast twice bigger than the one in Frankfurt. I could not > compete with the wonderful FOYLES though :):):) )
Foyles always seems to me a bit like an entry in the International Obfuscated C Code Competition. There are wonderful things in there, but it's all arranged carefully to make them as hard as possible to find. The only difference is that IOCCC entries are small.
> And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can > major in computer science from a German university (including my own > unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language.
What counts as "similar"? (Here in Cambridge, for instance, they don't study Lisp, but they do look at ML, which has some features in common with it.)
-- Gareth McCaughan Gareth.McCaug...@pobox.com sig under construction
Janos Blazi wrote: > I wanted to buy the English version. Of course I would never buy a > TRANSLATION!! The proverb "TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE" should be taken very, very > seriously!
<irrelevant> Douglas Hofstadter once remarked that it's a pity that that particular proverb translates so perfectly into English ("translator, traitor"). He suggested "Transductioner, treasoner" as a "better" translation. :-) </irrelevant>
-- Gareth McCaughan Gareth.McCaug...@pobox.com sig under construction
After I stopped cryingt I took my Oxford English Dictionary (my English is very weak). But alas! the word "f.....g" was not in the dictionary. After one hours study I saw that it contained no words with dots in them at all! So I called the company and they told me that I probably had the "Standard Edtion" which does not cotain such words. They asked me, why I wanted to know the meaning of that word. So I told them about our discussion and then they told me I have to buy the "Vulgar Edition". If it is not available at my local bookshop I can order it from amazon.com. And then it is delivered via FedEx or DHH and these companies are known to be very reliable. I additionally gave me the advice to order a copy of the "Dictionary for Historical Slang" at the same time as it may be of some help in the future.
Janos Blazi Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag: 3150360048695...@naggum.no...
> * Janos Blazi > | So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some > | outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart, if > | he tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I > | am probably really stupid.
> if your concern is _actually_ decency, start with yourself, right now: > you're the one responsible for the hostilities here at the moment. just > look at yourself and what indecency YOU write, for crying out loud!
> if you can't distinguish between DOING something stupid and BEING stupid, > perhaps you are entirely justified in your own case, but I do distinguish > between them, ALWAYS. smart people also do stupid things, but stop doing > them when criticized or made aware of their mistakes. stupid people tend > to want to PROVE that whatever they were doing was not stupid when they > get any form of criticism, harsh or friendly alike, and keep doing them > just to spite their criticizers. so if the shoe fits, wear it, but don't > blame me for your hardship or your reactions, and above all: don't even > _attempt_ to blame me for your very own personal negativity.
> | Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
> it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
> the Internet appears to work in Germany, too, and the last time I shipped > goods to Germany, both the postal services and outfits like FedEx and DHL > were in reputable operation. perhaps you are unaware of your ability to > order books from any large bookstore in the U.S.? whatever your imagined > problem, the real problems are easy to solve and immaterial to anyone who > actually wants something to happen, as opposed to only wanting to whine > and blame others for their sorry state of affairs.
> refusing to take part in this advancing communications world is simply > not smart, but I guess anyone's entitled to wait eight weeks just so he > doesn't have to dial an international phone number or use a credit card > or visit a web site or what have you. what they are not entitled to is > pretend that this is anybody's _fault_ but their own or a huge conspiracy > or whatever else makes it impossible to solve simple, straightforward, > and merely practical problems.
> just f.....g do it! how hard can it _be_?
> #:Erik, who gets _really_ tired of whining losers anywhere in the world, > thanks to the same advancing communications technology.
Marco Antoniotti wrote: > Anyway, my point was that (1) yes: it is hard to find (Common) Lisp > books in bookstores (2) this is indeed a sign of the shrinking > programmers' base
There must have been a lot of shrinking after the AI winter, but chances are that drop is way behind us.
I remember folks quoting the continuous increase of c.l.l. readers during the last few years. I think relatively little of can be attributed to the growth of the Internet, as universities and development shops have had access for a long time.
The relative luck of Lisp books in book shops is a simple indication of the fact that Lisp is not amongst the limelight languages in terms of popularity and hype. As such, it is simply not as reasonable to keep them on shelves. I have ordered books on-line for quite some time before the idea of buying it from a bookstore occurred to me (when it did, I found 4-5 of the more recent books in various outlets in New York, which is not famous for being the headquarters of software development or CS education).
Also, simply because Lisp is more stable and mature, there is no need to print new books just because of new features of the next version. The on-line sources, like CLHS, CLtL2 and now AMOP and David's book do a very good service.
The strongest reason could be the effect of computing becoming an ever more blue collar activity, as it becomes accessible to an ever wider range of people. It leads to lots of mediocre people being managed the McDonad's way. In the typical corporate IT environment, it pays off to be conformist to the extreme, and there is mostly negative incentive for innovation.
In my experience, it is hardly possible to buy _any_ kind of respectable computing weekly or periodical at newsagents and bookstores - at least in places like New York, Boston and London. I am not suggesting there are no exceptions, but the point is that it's easier to buy 5 magazines dealing with the latest portable computers than one magazine on CS or _any_ language.
To all those of you who might think that lisp is dead in Germany just because this guy claims he doesn't find any books in big bookstores: Just a few days ago, I got a mail from former colleagues at the university of Saarbrücken regarding their lecture in Common Lisp this semeseter.
But there's more:
"Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> writes: > But most unfortunately I live in Würzburg (600km? 500km?) and so it is not > the next bookshop near me.
My reaction to this was: I wouldn't be suprised if they actually teach Common Lisp at the university of Würzburg. And indeed: After just a few minutes of searching I found:
Robert Monfera <monf...@fisec.com> writes: > The relative luck of Lisp books in book shops is a simple indication of > the fact that Lisp is not amongst the limelight languages in terms of > popularity and hype. As such, it is simply not as reasonable to keep > them on shelves. I have ordered books on-line for quite some time > before the idea of buying it from a bookstore occurred to me (when it > did, I found 4-5 of the more recent books in various outlets in New > York, which is not famous for being the headquarters of software > development or CS education).
To get a perspective of the relationship between the "aliveness" of languages and the number of books about them that are available at offline bookstores, it helps to look at the numbers in more detail:
If you walk into the JF Lehmann's bookstore near the Technical University in Berlin, which is one of the best bookstores still available w.r.t. computer science books, you will get the following picture:
Language No. of books available ------------------------------------------------- C/C++ 0.7-1.0 shelves Java 0.5 shelves "Visual *" 0.5-1.0 shelves Perl&Python&Tcl 0.5 shelves OOP/OOAD/... 0.5 shelves Metatopics 0.5 shelves All other languages 1 row (ca. 0.15 shelves)
So what are these strange, esoteric other languages, you ask? Surely they must be little known also runs, probably only used in occult universities for one course and then forgotten about! So let's see what their quaint little names are:
For each of these languages you will normally find 0-2 books at JF Lehmann's, depending on your luck.
So are all these languages dead? I'd wager that between them, the written LoC (and even the number of LoC in operation) of the above languages squashes the number of LoC of all the "cool" languages combined. And new projects are indeed being undertaken in all of them all the time.
So numbers of books on bookshelves is no measure at all about the aliveness of languages at the current time. It _might_ be an indication of the aliveness of a language in 20 years, though even that seems unlikely.
> In my experience, it is hardly possible to buy _any_ kind of respectable > computing weekly or periodical at newsagents and bookstores - at least > in places like New York, Boston and London. I am not suggesting there > are no exceptions, but the point is that it's easier to buy 5 magazines > dealing with the latest portable computers than one magazine on CS or > _any_ language.
It also seems to me that there has been an alarming drop in high-quality professional publications in CS in the last decade. The more PCs and programming got to be mass-market afairs, the more high-quality publications either died of -- to be replaced by rubishy hobbyist glossies -- or reduced their quality to levels acceptable to the mass-market... So maybe the more interesting question would be: Is CS dead? ;-(
Regs, Pierre.
-- Pierre Mai <p...@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]
Marco Antoniotti <marc...@parades.rm.cnr.it> wrote: > Anyway, my point was that (1) yes: it is hard to find (Common) Lisp > books in bookstores (2) this is indeed a sign of the shrinking > programmers' base, and (3) this is not an encumbrance to getting these > books today, given that they are either available directly online or > thorugh Amazon and friends.
You are right on (1) and (3), but I think (2) is disputable. About four years ago, when I looked for Lisp books in some book stores, there were none. When I look nowadays, there are at least books about Emacs (Lisp). So one might argue that the situation has in fact improved.
Anyway, whether one can find Lisp books in book stores is becoming increasingly irrelevant, since you can get them sent to you for zero shipping cost after a dozen mouse clicks.
And I don't have the impression that the programmers' base is shrinking. I think it's expanding.
