Is LISP dying?
Andrew Cooke
Apologies for the attention grabbing title.
I'm from the UK, and self-taught as a software engineer - which
means that I've used a lot of C and Java, but have only used more
"academic" :-) languages in my spare time and, even if I had done
comp-sci, would have met Prolog and/or ML rather than Lisp.
Despite all that, I've recently decided to learn Lisp because it seems
to be one of the few languages that lets you use whatever
programming paradigm you choose, rather than forcing you in one
direction. I've ordered (and, today, received) Norvig's book on AI
which looks fascinating (I realise it may be out-of date in that it
doesn't contain "modern" AI, but it still seems like a nice book).
However - and forgive the preceding biography but it is intended to set
the ground and show this isn't flame-bait - I get the impression that
Lisp is on the way out. Now this is only a vague impression (more so
because, being in the UK which, whether we like it or not, is in Europe,
Lisp was never "in" here) - but with Harlequin going belly-up it seems
legitimate to ask: is Lisp a dying language?
If so, what is it's current level of use? And what next? Dylan?!
ML?!!! C++?!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It strikes me as a unique and very powerful
language, so what went wrong?
By "dying" I mean in decline, I would guess it's still used more than
any other "second league" language (anything other than C, C++ and maybe
Java) - but for how long?
As I hope is obvious, I would be happy to be corrected!
Thanks,
Andrew
http://www.andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk/index.html
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Craig Brozefsky
> However - and forgive the preceding biography but it is intended to set
> the ground and show this isn't flame-bait - I get the impression that
> Lisp is on the way out. Now this is only a vague impression (more so
> because, being in the UK which, whether we like it or not, is in Europe,
> Lisp was never "in" here) - but with Harlequin going belly-up it seems
> legitimate to ask: is Lisp a dying language?
It's one of the oldest languages still in active use. Many
organizations and individuals are still using it. There are several
free implementations, including one in the public domain that is rather
good, and still several commercial vendors.
So, it has more commercial implementations than perl, python, and tcl,
put together. It's an ANSI standard (CommonLisp that is). It has
more free implementations than just about any other language except
scheme (a member of the Lisp family itself).
--
Craig Brozefsky <cr...@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
I say woe unto those who are wise in their own eyes, and yet
imprudent in 'dem outside -Sizzla
Lyman S. Taylor
...
> direction. I've ordered (and, today, received) Norvig's book on AI
> which looks fascinating (I realise it may be out-of date in that it
> doesn't contain "modern" AI, but it still seems like a nice book).
It is a good book. Time will not cause that become untrue, just give it
more cohorts.
> Lisp is on the way out. Now this is only a vague impression (more so
> because, being in the UK which, whether we like it or not, is in Europe,
> Lisp was never "in" here) - but with Harlequin going belly-up it seems
> legitimate to ask: is Lisp a dying language?
My impression is that there a plethora of factors involved in Harlequin going "belly-up".
[ I'd label it as being in intensive care, a number of people recover
from being on the critical list. That isn't quite the same as being
in the morgue.]
"Lisp", "ML", and "Dylan", the languages, in and of themselves weren't the major cause of
these problems for Harlequin. Harlequin also had an "experimental" corportate
structure, for their relative size, which I surmise was also a factor.
There are dozens of ways to run your company out of business that have nothing
to do with whether you are providing a product/service that is viable.
The "lisp business" isn't a license to print money so if you stumble across one
of the dozen you may trip and fall.
Everyone keeps pointing the figure at the Language business. I get the impression
that the margins shrank, perhaps quickly, on the printing side of house too.
( there were likely cross subsidies, but whether they were "necessary" or not
is likely debatable) Harlequin isn't a publically accountable firm so what exactly
happened is somewhat a mystery.
> By "dying" I mean in decline, I would guess it's still used more than
> any other "second league" language (anything other than C, C++ and maybe
> Java) - but for how long?
"second league"? In terms of number of lines in commerical use I
imagine Cobol puts all of the above into the "second league". It doesn't
have no where near the "hype" factor going for it though. So perhaps it is
a matter of perception.
This all has be taken in perspective. If C++ and Java grow at 50% per year and
"Lisp" grows at 20% per year is Lisp "dying"? Some will say yes. Possibly
because the "biggest herd" always wins or that the language business is some sort
of zero sum game. So growth and overall percentage is all that ever counts. Others
will say no. All ecosystems have niches; being in a niche doesn't mean you're
"dying". "Lisp" has a proven track record as a long term survivor.
IMHO, if "Harlequin" does disappear and no new competitor pops up to replace it then
"Lisp" isn't very healthly. A reasonable amount of competition keeps the vendor(s)
honest. Although "Lisp" has more then enough "external" competition to contend with.
---
Lyman
nco...@bridgetrix.com
>
> IMHO, if "Harlequin" does disappear and no new competitor pops up to
replace it then
> "Lisp" isn't very healthly. A reasonable amount of competition keeps
the vendor(s)
> honest. Although "Lisp" has more then enough "external" competition to
contend with.
A Harlequin tech support representative I've been corresponding with is
under the impression that they'll be bought up soon and continue with Lisp
virtually uninterrupted.
As to the first topic, I'm just about to start a job search and have
been informed there aren't any Lisp jobs out there.
Neil Cohen
Bridge Trix
Producers of the Bobby Wolff Bridge Mentoring Series
http://www.bridgetrix.com
Andi Kleen
>
> So, it has more commercial implementations than perl, python, and tcl,
> put together. It's an ANSI standard (CommonLisp that is). It has
> more free implementations than just about any other language except
> scheme (a member of the Lisp family itself).
<offtopic and doesn't really matter, but anyways>
I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
-Andi
--
This is like TV. I don't like TV.
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
-Rob
[*] This is one of the frequent criticisms of Scheme! ;-}
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Tim Bradshaw
comp.lang.misc seems like a bad idea to me..]
* Andrew Cooke wrote:
> However - and forgive the preceding biography but it is intended to set
> the ground and show this isn't flame-bait - I get the impression that
> Lisp is on the way out. Now this is only a vague impression (more so
> because, being in the UK which, whether we like it or not, is in Europe,
> Lisp was never "in" here) - but with Harlequin going belly-up it seems
> legitimate to ask: is Lisp a dying language?
No, it's not dying. Statistics are hard to come by and not often very
useful, but the evidence I see is that it is doing reasonably well,
albeit in areas that are not very visible. A few years ago things
were worse (I guess as reaction to all the AI hype which Lisp got
associated with), but I think things are OK now. I think use is
increasing.
As far as I know, neither Harlequin nor Lucid before them went under
as a result of their Lisp business: Lucid (I think) went under because
of a failed (but very interesting) C++ development system, and
Harlequin went under because of something-not-Lisp.
--tim
Martin Rodgers
says...
> Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
> How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
If we only count the systems that a single programmer knows, we might
dismiss any language as irrelevant. The numbers argument is always a
weak one (see my final point, below). The numbers only matter when you
can count the number of implementations on the fingers of one hand and
such implementations require considerable effort to create.
I've known Forth programmers who create a Forth just like sneezing. I
wouldn't be suprised if there are Scheme implementors who can do the
same thing, but in Forth there's a very fine line between using Forth
and implementing Forth. (It used to take me about 3 weeks to create a
Forth from scratch, and I'm no expert.) In Lisp, we tend to build the
language up rather than down. In Forth, we go up _and_ down.
Glancing over my monitor at my bookcase, I spy a book that features a
series of Scheme implementations, none of them very big. If we're
talking about commercial and freeware Forths, that's another matter.
Systems like that tend to need documentation.
It looks to me like Forth is as much in decline as Common Lisp and
Scheme, and neither language is in danger of dying. Perhaps we should
be counting programmers instead of systems, but that's much harder to
do. Comparing web/ftp logs might be easier.
All I know is, everytime somebody asks if (or claims that) a language
is dead, dozens of programmers jump up and shout about how healthy it
is, and how many people are using it. Then somebody mentions Cobol.
--
Remove insect from address | You can never browse enough
will write code that writes code that writes code for food
William Tanksley
>Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
>+---------------
>| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
>+---------------
>Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
>How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
Grin... There's at least one Forth for every Forth programmer. It's
almost a rite of passage -- to be a Forth programmer you have to implement
your own Forth. Preferably experimental in nature, but otherwise
compatible.
With the arrival of ANSI this slowed down; now that Chuck's mentioned
Machine Forth it's sped back up again.
>-Rob
--
-William "Billy" Tanksley
Christopher B. Browne
>Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
>+---------------
>| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
>+---------------
>
>Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
>How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
There were a half-dozen Forths for Atari 8 bit, and about a half-dozen
for Atari ST.
I count 28 distinct implementations at
<http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
comprehensive.
--
Lisp Users:
Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
Stig Hemmer
This is a frequently asked question, even if not a Frequently Asked
Question.
A short summary:
Lisp took a hit when the "AI wave" faded away, but is recovering
nicely.
The reason Lisp seems so small is that the rest of the computer
industry is so enourmous.
Stig Hemmer,
Jack of a Few Trades.
Christopher R. Barry
> As to the first topic, I'm just about to start a job search and have
> been informed there aren't any Lisp jobs out there.
There are hundreds of thousands of Lisp jobs out there. It's a matter
of your perspective. Just because when you look through ads all you
see is "BS with 3 years experience and strong C, C++, Perl and Java
skills..." doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use Lisp for the
job, or at least part of the job.
Also, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission....
Christopher
Eric O'Dell
>The reason Lisp seems so small is that the rest of the computer
>industry is so enourmous.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. If language X used to be used for
25% of all applications (as if we have _any_ way of acquiring reliable
statistics like that), but is now being used for only 5% of all
applications, one might be tempted to say it is in decline --- but not
if the number of applications has grown by, say, 500%.
Advocates of the popular languages/methodologies du jour like to say
that their favorite language will soon eliminate everything else, the
current offenders being C++ and Java. But this is pure bull; the
number of languages and methodologies continues to grow, which is,
IMHO, a sign of the increasing diversity and maturity of the field.
If COBOL can persist as long as it has, it's a safe bet that our
grandchildren will be debugging C programs.
-E.
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| "I have come a very long way from myself only to realize that |
| identity is a skill and self-betrayal is a habit. Once lost, the |
| former is very hard to regain; once gained, the latter is very |
| hard to lose." ---I. Corvus, _The Europe of Our Dreams_ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
http://members.tripod.com/~abadger
Eric O'Dell
Barry) wrote:
>There are hundreds of thousands of Lisp jobs out there. It's a matter
>of your perspective. Just because when you look through ads all you
>see is "BS with 3 years experience and strong C, C++, Perl and Java
>skills..." doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use Lisp for the
>job, or at least part of the job.
>
>Also, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission....
This is true. I just finished a contract job using C when what was
requested was Perl. In this particular case, my employer had no
in-house programmers, and it was easy to persuade him that a C
programmer would be easier to find down the road than a Perl
programmer. (After I convinced him that CGI scripts don't have to be
written in Perl, of course, which took some doing.)
Smaller shops are more open to this sort of thing than big corporate
installations, but there are exceptions everywhere. The ads in the
paper are often discouraging, but then again, they are often written
by HR personnel who are just repeating buzzwords.
Johan Kullstam
> Still, I think Lisp has some trouble because it's not as easy to use
> for shippable desktop applications as, say, C. Most of the free
> Lisp systems tend to be rather large with little thought given to
> turnkey applications. The best commercial Lisp on the
> market--Allegro Common Lisp--isn't royalty free. On the other hand,
> desktop applications are a small part of the overall picture.
what do you mean desktop application?
lisp suffers because it's hard to make hello world type starter
programs that stand alone in a lisp hostile operating system, e.g.,
unix, microsoft dos/windows[1].
lisp tends to seem large and awkward in the context of unix. C has
run-time library support and all kinds of operating system hooks. the
comparison is unfair, however, a completely fair appraisal is
unrealistic.
if you mean by desktop applications things like spreadsheets and
wordprocessors, then i would think that lisp would be the perfect
language. these applications are large and complex in the first
place. lisp is good at large and complex. a lisp run-time would be
lost in the noise. consider how well emacs works for text. now
imagine a lisp based wordprocessor. unfortunately, no one uses lisp
for these but that is more out of ignorance than sound judgement imho.
[1] (format t "hello world~%") is certainly easy. the hard part is
getting the operating system to cooperate in loading and launching
lisp to process this.
--
J o h a n K u l l s t a m
[kull...@ne.mediaone.net]
Don't Fear the Penguin!
Pierre R. Mai
> As to the first topic, I'm just about to start a job search and have
> been informed there aren't any Lisp jobs out there.
Hmmm, there was a job ad on here a couple of days ago. Last time I
had a look at the offerings of a popular Job search engine over here,
I had no problem finding 3-5 jobs featuring Lisp here in Europe.
So I think there are a number of Lisp jobs out there. OTOH you
probably have to be more flexible to take advantage of them
(i.e. relocating, changing areas of interest, etc.), than for many
other languages that are a tad more popular.
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]
Johan Kullstam
> In article <m2g12vd...@sophia.axel.nom>, Johan Kullstam <kull...@ne.mediaone.net> reiterated false information:
>
> > lisp suffers because it's hard to make hello world type starter
> > programs that stand alone in a lisp hostile operating system, e.g.,
> > unix, microsoft dos/windows[1].
>
> Have you ever tried? LWW? ACL? Golden CL? CLOE? LW? LCL?
> Eclipse CL? Clisp? GCL? CMU CL? CLICC? MCL? Chestnut CL?
> Corman Lisp? Exper Common Lisp? Procyon Common Lisp? L?
> Codemist Common Lisp? ECoLisp? LinkLisp? ...?
> You mean *all* these Lisp system have been developed
> without making it easy to develop applications?
i use linux and windows nt. i've tried CMUCL, clisp and ACL5. i find
that they are all awkward at producing a hello world application.
sure i can open up a lisp and type (format t "hello world") or (load
"hello-world") and then run something. sometimes, i can put
#!/usr/bin/lisp at the top of a lisp script. some lisps get upset
about lines beginning with #!. in any event, they (at least CMUCL,
clisp and trial ACL5) don't produce a stand alone binary i can copy to
someone. maybe i am doing something wrong.
i am not trying to run anyone down. i just started using lisp about
6-7 months ago and i really like it. it's just that unix and windows
are set up to support C and C++. e.g., C has a largish libc these
days. it's pretty much always in core and therefore no one pays any
attention to it.
> > lisp tends to seem large and awkward in the context of unix.
>
> Have you ever tried? We are doing it all the time.
i use lisp for lots of stuff. i just wish i had an operating system
which offered better integration with lisp. perhaps i am missing some
things i could do? is there a lisp-howto for linux out there? i mean
paul graham's books, the hyperspec, steele's book, the cmucl user
manual, acls docs are great. however i haven't found a good low level
nitty gritty here's how you use emacs, here's how you get a bash shell
in linux to launch a lisp program, when should you clobber and restart
your lisp listener, how many lisps do you need going at once &c.
> > now imagine a lisp based wordprocessor. unfortunately, no one uses lisp
> > for these
>
> No one? How do you know?
>
> An example: Ever heard of Interleaf? From the Interleaf FAQ:
no, i had never heard of interleaf. thanks.
> 1.1. What is Interleaf?
[snip]
> That you don't have heard about publishing applications using Lisp
> doesn't mean that they don't exist (-> Schematext, Concordia, ...).
nod. thanks for the info.
Kent M Pitman
http://world.std.com/~pitman/pfaq/cross-posting.html ]
Andrew Cooke <and...@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> writes:
> I get the impression that Lisp is on the way out.
Lisp marketing is tricky and not always done right. High tech
marketing in general is hard to do. Look at the Macintosh. Not
exactly a piece of junk. Keeping a company going is harder than
keeping interest in the company going. Cash flow can be very tricky.
If you like something, buy its products.
Btw, there are a LOT of users of Lisp who do not buy its products and
prefer to use freeware; if you ask me, it is that practice which hurts
the community most of all. People need to either contribute money (or
public effort, if they insist on using publicware) but they should not
expect to just "consume" without putting something back and have the
community survive.
Also, seems to me that you should not see yourself as an isolated
party. Your words can have an effect, and flamebait or not, you
should take that into account when choosing both the forum and the
subject line for posts--ESPECIALLY when cross-posting, since that
virtually assures you will see an audience of people who are talking
at crossed purposes with zero hope of resolution.
Subject lines such as the one you chose and the forum in which you
chose to express it (I've removed comp.lang.misc) are dangerous. You
potentially do damage to any product by asking these questions in a
highly visible forum if what you say is within a threshold range that
someone who isn't paying attention is just looking for an excuse to
say "oh, look, someone else was wondering the same".
The questions that are relevant are not "how many other people like
this" but "is this good for me". If you don't know what it takes to
make something "good enough" for your purposes, you probably have some
things about the technical world and the business world that you
should be more concerned about catching up on than you are about
worrying about lisp. A good engineer should know what it will take to
satisfy their needs, independent of the businesses involved. For
example, if I told you all the hammer companies in the world were
going out of business, would you (a) rush to buy a hammer or (b) try
to build your next house without a hammer?
How many other people are using something is not very relevant if
you're producing finished applications. What matters is speed, time
to market, If you really think your application can be written in some
other language, and that it won't take any more time to do it in
another language, then use the other language for that reason. Most
people who use Lisp use it because there are big gains to be had for
using it in terms of development time, debuggability, flexible
retargetability in case of changing conditions, etc. If you don't
need those features, and perhaps others like them, you are probably in
the space of "commodity languages" and not seeing the reason people
cling to Lisp. But if you need the things for which Lisp offers
almost unique solutions, then stop sending posts asking if Lisp is
dying and start trying to make it win. Such posts, flame bait or not,
simply do NOT help, and I for one think you should read my HTML page
on cross-posting and take it very seriously ESPECIALLY for posts like
this which are such high risk of being misinterpreted, confused, and
otherwise attracting random, uninformed opinions.
I have little tolerance for this kind of discussion these days. It's been
flogged to death and you'd be better off pulling up one of its clones
from Deja News (http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml) than making us repeat it.
If you really can't deal with CL because of the risk, try Scheme. But
please don't cross-post those communities either. For all its similarity,
it's really quite different and discussions that seek to draw us together
often backfire.
I may or may not follow up on this thread further, but I am going to try
not to. I really don't think this was a good use of my time, and I did
it only grudgingly as a form of damage control after you, intentionally
or otherwise, took the like-it-or-not negative act of starting this thread.
You'd have done better to just send private mail to someone you saw post here
or to do some thread research for similar threads before starting this.
Rainer Joswig
> lisp suffers because it's hard to make hello world type starter
> programs that stand alone in a lisp hostile operating system, e.g.,
> unix, microsoft dos/windows[1].
Have you ever tried? LWW? ACL? Golden CL? CLOE? LW? LCL?
Eclipse CL? Clisp? GCL? CMU CL? CLICC? MCL? Chestnut CL?
Corman Lisp? Exper Common Lisp? Procyon Common Lisp? L?
Codemist Common Lisp? ECoLisp? LinkLisp? ...?
You mean *all* these Lisp system have been developed
without making it easy to develop applications?
> lisp tends to seem large and awkward in the context of unix.
Have you ever tried? We are doing it all the time.
> now imagine a lisp based wordprocessor. unfortunately, no one uses lisp
> for these
No one? How do you know?
An example: Ever heard of Interleaf? From the Interleaf FAQ:
1.1. What is Interleaf?
Interleaf, Inc. provides software and services to allow organizations
to build, integrate and manage document systems. Interleaf software
covers the full range of document processes: accessing information,
developing text and graphic documents, putting them through their
review and revision processes, distributing them electronically or on
paper, and managing the entire process.
"Interleaf 6" is a document authoring and composition package. It
provides an integrated set of tools for creating compound documents:
word processing, graphics, data-driven business charts, tables,
equations, image editing, automated page layout, book building-
including automatic index and TOC, conditional document assembly. It
includes several features engineered to support the production of large
and complex document sets, including: centralized control over parts
or all of a document (format and/or content), global search and
replace/change on individual graphics objects regardless of specific
orientation or position, revision management.
Also available (on some platforms) is the optional Developer's Toolkit
(DTK) for customizing or extending the capabilities of the above
authoring tool. Developer's Toolkit is used to write programs in
Interleaf Lisp. Interleaf Lisp is similar to CommonLISP, but it also
contains an extensive set of classes, methods, and functions for
examining and changing almost all Interleaf objects, including
documents and their contents. DTK includes an editor, debugger,
compiler, listener, interpreter, and on-line documentation. Lisp code
developed with DTK, or even written with an ordinary editor, can be
executed by the stock system, so that customization or the provision of
special functionality is not limited to installations with DTK. In
fact, much of the distributed system is written in Lisp.
Rainer Joswig
> about lines beginning with #!. in any event, they (at least CMUCL,
> clisp and trial ACL5) don't produce a stand alone binary i can copy to
> someone. maybe i am doing something wrong.
I've been doing this for years with MCL and now also with LWW.
We do all our scripting and applications on Unix with CLisp (favorite),
GCL (historical), siod (CGIs) and scsh (shell scripting).
We don't do any PERL, Python, TCL or any other lesser language.
> > Have you ever tried? We are doing it all the time.
>
> i use lisp for lots of stuff. i just wish i had an operating system
> which offered better integration with lisp.
Unless you get a Lispm, Macintosh Common Lisp has (IMBO)
the best OS integration.
> perhaps i am missing some
> things i could do? is there a lisp-howto for linux out there?
http://www.telent.net/lisp/
http://www.telent.net/lisp/howto.html
http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/clisp.html
http://www.elwoodcorp.com/alu/table/contents.htm
...
> i mean
> paul graham's books, the hyperspec, steele's book, the cmucl user
> manual, acls docs are great. however i haven't found a good low level
> nitty gritty here's how you use emacs, here's how you get a bash shell
> in linux to launch a lisp program, when should you clobber and restart
> your lisp listener, how many lisps do you need going at once &c.
Such info is partly available. If you write something
or you find something on the web submit it to the
ALU pages:
http://www.elwoodcorp.com/alu/table/about.htm
Nick Levine
>lisp suffers because it's hard to make hello world type starter
>programs that stand alone in a lisp hostile operating system, e.g.,
>unix, microsoft dos/windows[1].
I don't think this is true in the majority of (or, possibly, any) serious
lisps.
- n
Lars Marius Garshol
* Tim Bradshaw
|
| Lucid (I think) went under because of a failed (but very
| interesting) C++ development system
Richard Gabriel writes about this in 'Patterns of Software', and they
did a Lisp development system first and then turned to C++. The
reasons they failed seemed to be a mix of bad luck, personnel problems
and a bad move. (The latter being to invest heavily in development for
an IBM platform that never came off the way it should have.)
This is from memory, though, so apply a grain of salt.
--Lars M.
Pierpaolo Bernardi
: sometimes, i can put
: #!/usr/bin/lisp at the top of a lisp script. some lisps get upset
: about lines beginning with #!.
You may put an appropriate SET-DISPATCH-MACRO-CHARACTER in all the CLs
initialization files, like the following (not tested, as I don't have
a lisp here):
(set-dispatch-macro-character
#\# #\!
#'(lambda (stream char foo)
(declare (ignore char foo))
(loop for c = (read-char stream nil nil)
while c
while (char/= c #\Newline))
(values)))
P.
Mark Carroll
<nco...@bridgetrix.com> wrote:
(snip)
> As to the first topic, I'm just about to start a job search and have
>been informed there aren't any Lisp jobs out there.
Hey, I use some Modula-3 in my current job, and also write Modula-3 as
a consultant to another place, and I would bet that Common Lisp is
much 'bigger' than M3! (-: Quite simply, you just have to find jobs
where your employers are more interested in the fact that you're
solving their problems than in imposing their half-baked notions of
the best way to go about it. So, if you don't find any Lisp jobs, look
for flexible software-development posts. If you can demonstrate decent
software you've already written, that goes a long way.
(Just be verbose in your comments, etc. to help colleagues with little
Lisp knowledge work on the code if they have to!)
This is fairly general, so fu set to c.l.m only.
-- Mark
Pierre R. Mai
> manual, acls docs are great. however i haven't found a good low level
> nitty gritty here's how you use emacs, here's how you get a bash shell
> in linux to launch a lisp program, when should you clobber and restart
> your lisp listener, how many lisps do you need going at once &c.
Bundled with the Debian CMU CL packages, there is a short file
somewhere in /usr/doc/cmucl/ that explains how to get Linux to start
lisp files via CMU CL...
Jerry Avins
>
> On 11 Jul 1999 10:11:19 GMT, Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com> posted:
> >Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
> >+---------------
> >| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
> >+---------------
> >
> >Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
> >How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
>
> There were a half-dozen Forths for Atari 8 bit, and about a half-dozen
> for Atari ST.
>
> I count 28 distinct implementations at
> <http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
> comprehensive.
I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
Forth) for KIM-1. Also Aforth standalone for Z-80. Lately, I haven't
seen them on any list.
> --
> Lisp Users:
> Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
> cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
--
Engineering is the art | Let's talk about what
of making what you want | you need; you may see
from things you can get. | how to do without it.
---------------------------------------------------------
my-las...@mediaone.net
>i use linux and windows nt. i've tried CMUCL, clisp and ACL5. i find
>that they are all awkward at producing a hello world application.
>sure i can open up a lisp and type (format t "hello world") or (load
>"hello-world") and then run something. sometimes, i can put
>#!/usr/bin/lisp at the top of a lisp script. some lisps get upset
>about lines beginning with #!. in any event, they (at least CMUCL,
>clisp and trial ACL5) don't produce a stand alone binary i can copy to
>someone. maybe i am doing something wrong.
>
>i am not trying to run anyone down. i just started using lisp about
>6-7 months ago and i really like it. it's just that unix and windows
>are set up to support C and C++. e.g., C has a largish libc these
>days. it's pretty much always in core and therefore no one pays any
>attention to it.
Using lisp for "Hello world" is a bit like:
- using Macsyma to balance your check book
- using Adobe Photoshop to view GIF files
- Using the Hoover dam to recharge your AA batteries
It's value is in its capacity to assist in solving big/complex problems.
Once viewed in that light, it's a question of "look at this solution to our hard
problem" and not "I can't run it from my .cshrc".
All a matter of perspective.
[...]
>
>i use lisp for lots of stuff. i just wish i had an operating system
>which offered better integration with lisp. perhaps i am missing some
>things i could do? is there a lisp-howto for linux out there? i mean
>paul graham's books, the hyperspec, steele's book, the cmucl user
>manual, acls docs are great. however i haven't found a good low level
>nitty gritty here's how you use emacs, here's how you get a bash shell
>in linux to launch a lisp program, when should you clobber and restart
>your lisp listener, how many lisps do you need going at once &c.
On that sentiment you'll find lots of agreement. Lots of people run scheme
derivatives as login shells, but I'm not the guy to tell you how.
D. Tenny
my-las...@mediaone.net - no spam please
my-las...@mediaone.net
>nco...@bridgetrix.com writes:
>
>> As to the first topic, I'm just about to start a job search and have
>> been informed there aren't any Lisp jobs out there.
>
>There are hundreds of thousands of Lisp jobs out there. It's a matter
>of your perspective. Just because when you look through ads all you
>see is "BS with 3 years experience and strong C, C++, Perl and Java
>skills..." doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use Lisp for the
>job, or at least part of the job.
I'm rather skeptical of the claim that there are hundreds of thousands of Lisp
jobs out there. In fact, I bet there are fewer than 50 paying lisp job openings
open this minute around the world. (I'm talking about commercial software
endeavors which are using lisp to code the software).
However I have one available and will post elsewhere in this conference.
Send resumes to (concatenate 'string "dtenny"
"@" "truesoft.com") if you want more info.
As to whether lisp is dying, I prefer to think of it as "commercially
challenged". It'll never die as long as there's interest. Finding a good
commercially supported lisp for business is getting more difficult however.
In this regard, Franz may be pricey, but their business model is probably more
solid than many lisp vendors which went before them, as evidenced by the fact
they're still around.
Matt Curtin
Christopher> Also, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission....
I like Eric Naggum's "Nike approach to Lisp":
No apologies. No excuses. Just do it.
--
Matt Curtin cmcu...@interhack.net http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/
Kucera, Rich
> Franz may be pricey, but their business model is probably more
> solid than many lisp vendors which went before them, as evidenced by
the fact
> they're still around.
> D. Tenny
what's a "business model"?
Tim Bradshaw
* my-last-name wrote:
> I'm rather skeptical of the claim that there are hundreds of
> thousands of Lisp jobs out there. In fact, I bet there are fewer
> than 50 paying lisp job openings open this minute around the
> world. (I'm talking about commercial software endeavors which are
> using lisp to code the software).
Well, there may not be very many jobs which say `Lisp' in the job
description. But I use Lisp every day at work (in a commercial
environment), though no one but me knows or cares about anything other
than whether stuff gets done. Lisp gets stuff done for me...
--tim
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
+---------------
Uh... Having ported Doug Wrege's version of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10
Spring 1971, I can say with some confidence that FOCAL isn't even *vaguely*
Forth-like -- it's much closer to JOSS & MUMPS, and in fact, was developed
by Richey Lary following his participation in the first installation of
MUMPS at Mass Gen. While (old, original) MUMPS had "string" as it's only
data type (like Tcl), FOCAL had "floating point" as its only data type.
(In fact, mutable "strings" were emulated with arrays of floating-point
numbers, each array element representing one character.)
Like JOSS & MUMPS & BASIC & FORTRAN -- but unlike Forth -- FOCAL has
traditional infix arithmetic with "the usual" operator priorities,
that is, the assignment "SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468" is interpreted as
"SET A=((B+(C*4.35))-(D/2.468))".
-Rob
p.s. My FOCAL-10 port involved some serious rewriting of the internal
FOCAL lexical subroutines SORTC & SORTJ to become two-instruction macros
that made heavy use of the PDP-10 byte pointer stuff and "byte strips"
to encode enumerated character equivalence classes. (Hey, it made it
run 25 times faster!) It used some really hairy "MACRO-10" (the PDP-10
assembler) macros to build those tables at compile time. Imagine my
immense delight when I was exposed to Common Lisp and learned that:
1. The style of table-building I'd been writing in PDP-10 assembler
could be done *much* more naturally -- almost trivially, in fact --
with Lisp macros; and
2. That Common Lisp had preserved at least a little of the flavor of
the PDP-10 variable-sized byte operations... with the same names,
even: LDB, DPB, BYTE, BYTE-SIZE, BYTE-POSITION. Way cool!
I just wish I'd gotten into Lisp 20 years earlier than I did... (*sigh*)
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Bart Lateur
>Like JOSS & MUMPS & BASIC & FORTRAN -- but unlike Forth -- FOCAL has
>traditional infix arithmetic with "the usual" operator priorities,
>that is, the assignment "SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468" is interpreted as
>"SET A=((B+(C*4.35))-(D/2.468))".
This must be totally off-topic, but...
I thought I had read that one of the peculiarities of MUMPS is that the
was NO operator precedence? That everything was just executed from left
to right? That, therefore,
SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468
would be interpreted as
SET A=(((B+C)*4.35)-D)/2.468
?
Bart.
Michael Coughlin
> On 11 Jul 1999 10:11:19 GMT, Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com
> posted:
> >Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
> >+---------------
> >| I would guess there are more Forths than Schemes.
> >+---------------
> >Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
> >How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
> There were a half-dozen Forths for Atari 8 bit, and about a half-dozen
> for Atari ST.
> I count 28 distinct implementations at
> <http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
> comprehensive.
There are roughly a hundred versions of Forth that you can
get copies of. If you have a need for a special version of
Forth,
mention it on comp.lang.forth, and somebody will offer to send
you a copy of his unpublished version that he never got around
to
finishing. Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
of
a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on the
shelves
of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
can still get some nice books about Logo to get then started.
--
Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net Cambridge, MA USA
Fernando D. Mato Mira
There are roughly a hundred versions of Forth that you can
get copies of. If you have a need for a special version of
Forth,
mention it on comp.lang.forth, and somebody will offer to send
you a copy of his unpublished version that he never got around
to
finishing. Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
-- ((( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER ))) Fernando D. Mato Mira Real-Time SW Eng & Networking Advanced Systems Engineering Division CSEM Jaquet-Droz 1 email: matomira AT acm DOT org CH-2007 Neuchatel tel: +41 (32) 720-5157 Switzerland FAX: +41 (32) 720-5720 www.csem.ch www.vrai.com ligwww.epfl.ch/matomira.html
Jerry Avins
>
> Jerry Avins <jya...@erols.com> wrote:
> +---------------
> | I have Forth for the AIM-65 in ROM, SYM-1 on tape, and FOCAL (a sort-of
> | Forth) for KIM-1...
> +---------------
>
> Uh... Having ported Doug Wrege's version of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10
> Spring 1971, I can say with some confidence that FOCAL isn't even *vaguely*
> Forth-like -- it's much closer to JOSS & MUMPS, and in fact, was developed
> by Richey Lary following his participation in the first installation of
> MUMPS at Mass Gen. While (old, original) MUMPS had "string" as it's only
> data type (like Tcl), FOCAL had "floating point" as its only data type.
> (In fact, mutable "strings" were emulated with arrays of floating-point
> numbers, each array element representing one character.)
>
> traditional infix arithmetic with "the usual" operator priorities,
> that is, the assignment "SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468" is interpreted as
> "SET A=((B+(C*4.35))-(D/2.468))".
>
>
> p.s. My FOCAL-10 port involved some serious rewriting of the internal
> FOCAL lexical subroutines SORTC & SORTJ to become two-instruction macros
> that made heavy use of the PDP-10 byte pointer stuff and "byte strips"
> to encode enumerated character equivalence classes. (Hey, it made it
> run 25 times faster!) It used some really hairy "MACRO-10" (the PDP-10
> assembler) macros to build those tables at compile time. Imagine my
> immense delight when I was exposed to Common Lisp and learned that:
>
> 1. The style of table-building I'd been writing in PDP-10 assembler
> could be done *much* more naturally -- almost trivially, in fact --
> with Lisp macros; and
>
> 2. That Common Lisp had preserved at least a little of the flavor of
> the PDP-10 variable-sized byte operations... with the same names,
> even: LDB, DPB, BYTE, BYTE-SIZE, BYTE-POSITION. Way cool!
>
> I just wish I'd gotten into Lisp 20 years earlier than I did... (*sigh*)
>
> -----
> Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
> Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
> Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
> 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
> Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Rob,
I remember a Forth-like program I ran on the KIM, sitting at the
teletype in my kid's room working out algorithms to move an NC machine
in arbitrary circular arcs. I remember being annoyed because it seemed
that the major difference from Forth was the renaming of words just to
be different. My recollection that it was called Focal is evidently
faulty. Does anyone know what it might have been? (I had a video RAM on
that KIM, connected to a small TV monitor so I could plot the
trajectories. It was a better machine for my purpose than the mainframe
at work.)
Jerry
Bart Lateur
>I thought I had read that one of the peculiarities of MUMPS is that the
>was NO operator precedence? That everything was just executed from left
>to right? That, therefore,
>
> SET A=B+C*4.35-D/2.468
>
>would be interpreted as
>
> SET A=(((B+C)*4.35)-D)/2.468
>
>?
Somebody suggested (by e-mail) that I must have been thinking about
another language. Well, I looked it up. Here it is:
M[UMPS] by example: operators
http://www.jacquardsystems.com/Examples/operator.htm
I quote:
M[UMPS] evaluates strictly from left to right, so that 1+1*2
yields 4 and not 3.
Bart.
Elizabeth D Rather
>... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
>of
>a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on the
>shelves
>of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
>alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
>while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
>like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
>
> When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
>about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
>Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
>to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
>can still get some nice books about Logo to get then started.
Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
Cheers,
Elizabeth
Michael Schuerig
> I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
> alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
> like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
So, can you recommend any of those "zero" books? I've never used Forth
and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more attracted to languages from
the Lisp family -- nonetheless, my curiousity has slowly grown over the
years.
Michael
--
Michael Schuerig
mailto:schu...@acm.org
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/
Rob Warnock
+---------------+---------------
Thanks for the pinter!
+---------------
| M[UMPS] evaluates strictly from left to right, so that 1+1*2
| yields 4 and not 3.
+---------------
Well, what can I say?!? FOCAL *was* inspired directly by MUMPS, yet
it *did* have operator precedence, for arithmetic exprs at least --
I remember coding that part of FOCAL-10 as direct transliteration
of the FOCAL/F code. There was a separate small data stack for
intermediate results. (And a FOCAL-in-C snarfed off the net some
time ago agrees, too.)
Oh, well...
-Rob
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| M[UMPS] by example: operators
| http://www.jacquardsystems.com/Examples/operator.htm
+---------------
Thanks for the pointer!
Michael Coughlin
> Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net> wrote:
> > I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
> > alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> > while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the
> > big guys like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes
> > out at zero.
> So, can you recommend any of those "zero" books? I've never
> used Forth and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more
> attracted to languages from the Lisp family -- nonetheless,
> my curiousity has slowly grown over the years.
experienced computer user and net surfer. The problem I'm always
complaining about is the lack of Forth instructional material
for complete computer novices. I think this lack of interest in
providing new beginners material lowers the quality and quantity
of tutorial material for all levels of Forth.
The best book I've ever seen on programming for any
language was written for Forth -- "Starting Forth" by Leo
Brodie. Unfortunately this is out of print and available only
thru special order; its not on the shelf of bookstores like it
was for over ten years. There is one new book on Forth for
experienced programmers available from Amazon.com (not
bookstores) and also Forth Inc (http://www.forth.com). Of the
very roughly 100 versions of Forth available for various
computers and operating systems, 10 or 20 have some
documentation that will show how to use Forth for someone who
already knows how to program. The other systems assume that you
have read a book like "Starting Forth" or have learned another
version of Forth and can reverse engineer uncommented Forth
source code. There are several tutorials and articles on the web
that are very good and the amount of material is slowly growing.
See the FAQ for comp.lang.forth for a list. Actually there are
too many web pages for Forth and it is hard to sort thru all of
them to find the ones that tell you exactly what you want to
know. If you don't find what you need, post a message to
comp.lang.forth stating your favorite operating system, cpu and
applications and someone point you to the right place.
George Neuner
wrote:
>[ replying to comp.lang.lisp only
> http://world.std.com/~pitman/pfaq/cross-posting.html ]
>
>Andrew Cooke <and...@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> writes:
>
>> I get the impression that Lisp is on the way out.
>
>Lisp marketing is tricky and not always done right. High tech
>marketing in general is hard to do. Look at the Macintosh. Not
>exactly a piece of junk. Keeping a company going is harder than
>keeping interest in the company going. Cash flow can be very tricky.
>If you like something, buy its products.
>
>Btw, there are a LOT of users of Lisp who do not buy its products and
>prefer to use freeware; if you ask me, it is that practice which hurts
>the community most of all. People need to either contribute money (or
>public effort, if they insist on using publicware) but they should not
>expect to just "consume" without putting something back and have the
>community survive.
>
That's a wonderful sentiment - but reality dictates another course
because business rarely takes a long term market view. It does indeed
cost a significant amount to develop a decent language development
system and bring it to market, but many companies try to recoup too
quickly and price themselves out of the market.
The reason C/C++, and before that Pascal, took off was because forward
looking companies [I'm thinking of Borland in particular, but others
were also involved] took chances and sold their systems at well below
cost hoping to create their markets. It is true that these systems
were typically stripped down relative to "professional" development
systems available, but they introduced people to the language at
affordable cost and built a base of programmers familiar with both the
language in general and the company's products in particular.
Curious newcomers who lack the ability to set up a shareware/freeware
system may be willing to try a low cost commercial system which is
easy to install and use. Commercial Lisp implementors, for the most
part, either didn't offer low cost intro packages or didn't advertise
that they did. Out of sight, out of mind.
George Neuner
Dynamic Resolutions, Inc.
===================================================
The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not
reflect the opinions or policies of my employer.
===================================================
Michael Coughlin
> Michael Coughlin wrote in message <378B405C...@ne.mediaone.net>...
> >... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> >of a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on
> >as many books as Fortran, while Fortran has about one tenth
> >as many books as the big guys like C, Java, Visual Basic
> >and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
> > When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
> >about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
> >Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
> >to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
> >can still get some nice books about Logo to get then
> >started.
> Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
Amazon is not a bookstore. You can't drop in and
browse. If you don't know what Forth is, or think that Forth
isn't used anymore, you woun't notice a book about it by
accident when you're looking for some other topic on
programming. You can't just buy a book because you have it
in your hot little hand and it looks interesting. You can't
wrap it up and take it right home. People who don't even have an
account to access amazon.com and the web are the easiest to
influence to at least take a look at Forth. They have not
learned the bad habits of other programming languages and can
immediately appreciate the advantages of Forth.
I just looked for Forth books on amazon.com. Yes there
are several listings. There is only one listed as being in
print, and they say expect delivery within 4 to 6 weeks. There
are also listings for books by Leo Brodie. When I clicked on
"Thinking Forth" I got nothing but a system error. There are
five separate listings for Leo Brodie's book -- "Starting
Forth". That's reasonable since it is at least five times better
than the average book on programming. But its out of print. Its
available only by a special search. It will take them weeks to
find it or tell you if its not available. They don't tell you to
get it faster from the Forth Interest Group in California,
http://www.fig.org/ (at least until their special printing runs
out). Relying on amazon.com to sell Forth textbooks is not a
good thing. It would be better to have a publisher promoting the
book and getting it into bookstores.
Elizabeth Rather is much too shy and modest. She failed to
mention her own book the "Forth Programmers' Handbook". So I'll
tell everyone that it is the one Forth textbook that is in print
and for sale at amazon.com. When I go to my local technical
bookstores to see if it has finally arrived on the shelves (it
hasn't), I find instead books on the equally neglected computer
languages Lisp, Scheme and Logo. I think that Lisp and its
relatives are much more lively than Forth since they still have
recently revised textbooks for sale. Since Forth is still being
used, I can deduce that Lisp is still being used, even tho I
don't know where. But how long will Forth last without at least
a few easily found textbooks?
I wish old Forth programmers would become inspired by Lisp
programmers to write textbooks so they would be able to train
their replacements.
--
Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.com Cambridge, MA USA
Kent M Pitman
> Curious newcomers who lack the ability to set up a shareware/freeware
> system may be willing to try a low cost commercial system which is
> easy to install and use. Commercial Lisp implementors, for the most
> part, either didn't offer low cost intro packages or didn't advertise
> that they did. Out of sight, out of mind.
This is fine, but said people should not lament the passing of things
they are not willing to invest in. This newsgroup has a number of people
who my sense is both want a lot of free things and want to debug why
Lisp is in the trouble it's in. I think as much as anyone that the language
should be competitively priced and free things should be available. But
I also don't think there's any mystery that there are financial problems
that result from this.
In some ways, computer science got along better when things cost more.
It could afford to take a long-term point of view and invest. People
keep trying to ascribe the success or failure of companies to the
technology, but it's just plain hard managing the day-to-day cash
flow, because if you blink--or worse, if you take a moment to look at
the long term instead of the short term--you can lose out utterly now.
That's sad. Yes, the companies need to do their part, if they care to
stay in business, to keep prices low. The users need to do their
part, if they care to still have vendors, to sometimes buy from
them. It's not like you can just opt out of the paying part and still
reserve the right to care what happens.
> The reason C/C++, and before that Pascal, took off was because forward
> looking companies [I'm thinking of Borland in particular, but others
> were also involved] took chances and sold their systems at well below
> cost hoping to create their markets. It is true that these systems
> were typically stripped down relative to "professional" development
> systems available, but they introduced people to the language at
> affordable cost and built a base of programmers familiar with both the
> language in general and the company's products in particular.
I advocate this as much as anyone. But the fact is that there are a
LOT of free offerings of Lisp and of good quality. Each commercial
vendor pretty much has one. So this is NOT what we need more of.
Lisp itself is extraordinarily affordable already. To the point where
I think a lot of people who would be willing to buy it don't. Free software
can work both ways and should not be seen as a panacea.
Jerry Avins
> > alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> > while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
> > like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
>
> and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm much more attracted to languages from
> the Lisp family -- nonetheless, my curiousity has slowly grown over the
> years.
>
Look at http://erwin.phys.virginia.edu/classes/551/primer.txt That
should get you started.
Jerry Avins
>
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
>
> > Michael Coughlin wrote in message <378B405C...@ne.mediaone.net>...
> > >... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> > >of a computer language.
>
> > Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
>
> Amazon is not a bookstore. You can't drop in and
> browse.
> I just looked for Forth books on amazon.com. Yes there
> are several listings. There is only one listed as being in
> print, and they say expect delivery within 4 to 6 weeks.
Amazon always says "4 to 6 weeks", even if they know that the shipment
will arrive tomorrow. Does it take them that long to reprogram their
computer?
...
> --
> Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.com Cambridge, MA USA
Jerry
Mark K. Gardner
> [...]
>get it faster from the Forth Interest Group in California,
>http://www.fig.org/ (at least until their special printing runs
The URL should be <http://www.forth.org/> rather than the above.
Mark
--
Mark K. Gardner (mkga...@cs.uiuc.edu)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Real-Time Systems Laboratory
--
Kenneth P. Turvey
>
>I advocate this as much as anyone. But the fact is that there are a
>LOT of free offerings of Lisp and of good quality. Each commercial
>vendor pretty much has one. So this is NOT what we need more of.
>Lisp itself is extraordinarily affordable already. To the point where
>I think a lot of people who would be willing to buy it don't. Free software
>can work both ways and should not be seen as a panacea.
I called Franz a while back to find out about how much it would cost me
to get a Lisp system for use on my Linux box as a learning tool (I am
in grad school). I wanted to be able to use CLIM. The cost was
somewhere upwards of $1500.00. Because of this price tag I will not be
in the position to recommend CLIM to some future employer. I will not be
in a position to know its strengths or weaknesses. The Lisp community
may have just cost themselves quite a bit of money; there is no way to
tell.
Without free or low priced complete lisp systems (a system without a GUI
is not a system in todays market) available, the market will not grow.
--
Kenneth P. Turvey <ktu...@SprocketShop.com>
----------------- http://www.tranquility.net/~kturvey
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people
attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore,
depends on unreasonable people. -- George Bernard Shaw
Erik Naggum
| I get the impression that Lisp is on the way out.
something important happens when a previously privileged position in
society suddenly sees incredibly demand that needs to be filled, using
enormous quantities of manpower. that happened to programming computers
about a decade ago, or maybe two. first, the people will no longer be
super dedicated people, and they won't be as skilled or even as smart --
what was once dedication is replaced by greed and sometimes sheer need as
the motivation to enter the field. second, an unskilled labor force will
want job security more than intellectual challenges (to some the very
antithesis of job security). third, managing an unskilled labor force
means easy access to people who are skilled in whatever is needed right
now, not an investment in people -- which leads to the conclusion that a
programmer is only as valuable as his ability to get another job fast.
fourth, when mass markets develop, pluralism suffers the most -- there is
no longer a concept of healthy participants: people become concerned with
the individual "winner", and instead of people being good at whatever
they are doing and proud of that, they will want to flock around the
winner to share some of the glory.
Lisp is not the kind of language that insecure losers would use. people
do not want to learn Lisp because they stand a better chance of beating
another unskilled fool in the job race. fact is: you don't get a job by
lying about your Lisp skills. all of this means that there is very
little activity at the front gate, where all the journalists and the
media are. there are no people struggling like mad to get into the Lisp
world. they don't have to. if you want to learn Lisp, you go learn Lisp
and talk to nice people who probably have time for you, and you make
yourself good at it. then you go do complex stuff that insecure losers
who lie about their Java skills can't even imagine, and therefore do not
consider part of the competition.
neurosurgery is another field that requires an actual investment and lots
of dedication to get into, is really rewarding to those who get good at
it, but whose jobs are not advertised in regular newspapers. there is a
shortage of neurosurgeons, but very little advertising in the media that
the patients read. programming is both similar and different. whether
you are a user or a programmer these days is often hard to tell (this has
good qualities to it, too), but some programming tasks are still reserved
to highly skilled people who are not afraid to take huge risks. ignoring
for a moment the power of the American Medical Association, we still
wouldn't see a huge amount of books on neurosurgery for dummies in 21
days or whatever. it's just plain inappropriate, and it's intentionally
out of people's reach. Lisp is somewhat like that. people can get lots
of medicines at the drugstore, but they can't be trusted to carve out a
malignant tumor in their child's brain. all sorts of users can do lots
of customization and cool stuff in their "apps", but they really can't be
trusted to run actual flight control systems, configure the telephone
network, write software for video-synchronized magnetic-resonance imaging
for brain surgery, or write automated stock-trading systems. at some
point, the risk of letting unskilled people do the task becomes too
high. that's when you can't trust more than 1% of the programmers out
there, and a surprisingly large number of them know and use Lisp and
tools that are can be trusted. (consider an ATM that gets one of those
frequent Windows crashes, or a naval warfare vessel that has to cold-boot
because a certain display suddenly goes all blue, or any other story in
comp.risks that would have been hilarious if it had been a joke.)
another way to look at this is to see that software in today's society
has a number of diseased elements, to consider that maggots eat only
diseased or dead tissue, that dead or dying software projects lie around
all over the place, like a horrible war zone between ignorant users and
frightened managers, and pretend that you're a maggot. you wouldn't care
about the living and the healthy who prosper outside the war zone, you'd
rush to the war zone to join the feeding frenzy, right? so, to complete
the grim picture, software in our society is diseased, the activity you
read about are all about cleaning up the disasters and surviving the
equivalent of plagues, and it just takes a tremendous amount of people
and work to keep the whole system from dying, like the incredibly stupid
year-2000 problem.
to take but one simple example: suppose you thought of the new millennium
when you wrote your application back in 1972 -- not only wouldn't you be
invited to the party, those who knew you had done it right from the start
and who probably laughed at you at the time would positively hate you
now, and they sure as hell wouldn't tell people about you. and the more
stupid they are, the more important it would be to pretend that nobody
was smart enough to see the next millennium coming.
Lisp is a little too much out of the reach of the masses, and this needs
fixing, but the professional markets are not into language-of-the-week
contests and feeping creaturism in whatever won last week. when your
application takes longer to create than three versions of the JDK, you
don't use Java. the same applies to other long-term stuff. when you
write manuals for naval or air force vessels, you don't use MS Word and
hope Microsoft doesn't come out with yet another incompatible disservice
pack and/or upgrade, you use CALS and enterprise-wide publishing systems.
put yet another way, even though aviation has become a commodity and ever
more people fly around the country for the fun of it (well, maybe not,
but it's certainly not for the food), you don't see people complaining
that business class is in the decline. instead, you notice that there is
fierce competition in the cheaper tickets, but routes are set up mainly
to accomodate business travelers, and if you're willing to pay for it,
all sorts of amenities are available and life in the air is a lot better.
Lisp is not only object-oriented, it's the business class programming
language. (it really is the first-class programming language, but let's
talk about that when you have enough mileage.)
now, since you're worried about Lisp "dying", consider this: Lisp is used
a lot of places where all else has failed. some people are smart enough
(or have been burned enough) to use Lisp from the start, but just as you
can't expect people to pay for insurance until they have a reasonable
idea about the risks that exist around them, most people have to get
burned before they understand the value of investing in not failing.
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century
Andreas Kochenburger
(Christopher B. Browne) wrote:
>On 11 Jul 1999 10:11:19 GMT, Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com> posted:
>>Andi Kleen <ak...@muc.de> wrote:
>>Really??? There are dozens & dozens of Schemes[*] that *I* know of...
>>How many Forths are there? Even a dozen?
><http://www.forth.org/compilers.html>, and that list is decidedly not
>comprehensive.
>Lisp Users:
>Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
>cbbr...@ntlug.org- <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
Is there a "Forth in LISP" or a "LISP in FORTH"? I know only of a
Forth native code compiler written in PROLOG (recursion is natural in
PROLOG so the backtracking lends itself to compiling primitives first
and succeeding hilevel words).
Andreas
Andrew Cooke
Hi,
I've read all the responses so far, and I'm pretty convinced that Lisp
isn't that poorly (thank-you!). On the other hand, a couple of posts
seem to reflect a certain ghetto mentality, especially this last one:
Lisp is not the kind of language that insecure losers would use.
people do not want to learn Lisp because they stand a better chance
of
beating another unskilled fool in the job race. fact is: you don't
get a job by lying about your Lisp skills. all of this means that
there is very little activity at the front gate, where all the
journalists and the media are. there are no people struggling like
mad to get into the Lisp world. they don't have to. if you want to
learn Lisp, you go learn Lisp and talk to nice people who probably
have time for you, and you make yourself good at it. then you go do
complex stuff that insecure losers who lie about their Java skills
can't even imagine, and therefore do not consider part of the
competition.
I've been in both academia and industry (academia wasn't computer
science, but I don't think that's important here) and I can see where
this is coming from - it was a big surprise to get into "the real
world" and find people who were scared of learning more. But I don't
think this is a language issue. I've met some very good programmers
who work in C (and a few who work in Java) and they aren't good
despite using C, or because they are using C rather than Lisp - they
are simply good, and would be good whatever language they were using
(OK, a certain amount of experience is required, but the dominant
factor is an inate ability to "program").
Over the last few evenings I've been writing a small program in Python
that pushes the functional aspects of that language about as far as it
will go. I'm doing it like that because it seems the most elegant
way, but I know I could get the same results using it's more OO
aspects. And I could also translate it into Java (the original
development in Java would have been different because of the lack of
dynamic typing - I would have had to think through more of the ideas
before starting). I don't feel I am a "better" programmer when I use
one language rather than another, I'm simply using a different tool (I
feel I am a better programmer because I have learnt from learning and
using different languages, but that is not the same thing....).
There is a difference between Lisp and Java, say, which the example
above illustrates. Static typing can certainly change the development
process, and this can lead to hierarchical "code shops" where
creativity and coding are separated. But it doesn't have to, and
there are other advantages to a more formal design approach,
especially if you are in a commercial situation where it is better to
clarify exactly what the customer wants before implementation.
I can see how a language like Java allows less skilled people to
*produce* code, but *designing* code in any language requires a
similar level of ability. Different languages provide different
pathways to a solution, and have different costs and advantages in
development / analysis / specification / modification / maintenance.
This does not imply that a Java programmer is necessarily worse than a
Lisp programmer.
So, finally, my summary is: if Java attracts less skilled programmers
that is more because it is popular (maybe because it is more suited to
a code-shop approach) than because Lisp is necessarily "better".
A popular tool is not necessarily a bad tool. On the other hand, a
good tool, even if it requires skill to use, is often a popular tool -
possibly mis-used and abused.
Of course, Lisp may well be a good but (comparatively) rare tool - I
hope so.
Andrew (Which may be what the original post meant anyway...)
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Marcel Hendrix
[..]
>Is there a "Forth in LISP" or a "LISP in FORTH"?
LISP in Forth exists. Well, it doesn't try to emulate LISP but it adds
a LISP-like vocabulary to Forth, mainly list building words with garbage collection. The original
F-PC code for it is on Taygeta, it even has some documentation.
The GC stinks, I never got it to reliably work in a 32-bit flat model
Forth (iForth) after I converted it from its segment-based origin.
I've added some Prolog code to it published in JFAR (Feuerbacher?). The
demo is a rule-based AI program to determine animals :-)
-marcel
Ian Wild
You seem to have read a meaning into that paragraph
that was the exzact opposite of what I saw.
My interpretation:
Insecure losers may lie about their skills in order to get a job.
However, lying about your Lisp expertise is of little benefit in
today's job market.
To contradict this you'd have to produce an example
of an insecure loser who had successfully lied h(er|is)
way into a Lisp job. Instead you present non-losers
in non-Lisp jobs.
Johan Kullstam
> On Wed, 14 Jul 1999 17:35:09 GMT, Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> wrote:
> >
> >I advocate this as much as anyone. But the fact is that there are a
> >LOT of free offerings of Lisp and of good quality. Each commercial
> >vendor pretty much has one. So this is NOT what we need more of.
> >Lisp itself is extraordinarily affordable already. To the point where
> >I think a lot of people who would be willing to buy it don't. Free software
> >can work both ways and should not be seen as a panacea.
>
> I called Franz a while back to find out about how much it would cost me
> to get a Lisp system for use on my Linux box as a learning tool (I am
> in grad school). I wanted to be able to use CLIM. The cost was
> somewhere upwards of $1500.00. Because of this price tag I will not be
> in the position to recommend CLIM to some future employer.
$1500 can be a lot or a triffling sum depending on circumstance.
for you at this time, it's expensive. $1500 would be some 15% of my
gross income back when i was a graduate student at georgia tech. i
understand you need to eat.
however, $1500 is not a lot of money for business purposes[1].
test equipment such as spectrum analysers cost many thousands.
consider good asic chip design tools; these can cost $150k for a
license. if lisp is useful to you, $1500 is a bargain. the people at
franz also need to eat.
the problem is that without prior lisp experience, you will be hard
pressed to recommend it to your employer.
> I will not be in a position to know its strengths or weaknesses.
> The Lisp community may have just cost themselves quite a bit of
> money; there is no way to tell.
life isn't fair. i think franz is very generous with their trial
edition.
> Without free or low priced complete lisp systems (a system without a GUI
> is not a system in todays market) available, the market will not
> grow.
you can use the linux trial edition. you can use clisp or cmucl.
so there are systems you can use. i agree that gui construction ought
to be a natural for lisp and that the trial editions do not make it as
readily available as, e.g., visual basic[2]. there seems to be a
little bit of work[3] with gui toolkits and cmucl going on. perhaps
joining that effort would help you get started at a price you can
afford.
[1] businesses can deduct expenses from their taxes.
[2] visual basic while a weak programming language gives access to
many gui building functions.
[3] e.g., making a free clim, calling gtk through a ffi.
--
J o h a n K u l l s t a m
[kull...@ne.mediaone.net]
Don't Fear the Penguin!
Rainer Joswig
> > I called Franz a while back to find out about how much it would cost me
> > to get a Lisp system for use on my Linux box as a learning tool (I am
> > in grad school). I wanted to be able to use CLIM. The cost was
> > somewhere upwards of $1500.00.
The Professional Edition of LispWorks 4.1 for the Windows platform
is priced at $799. LispWorks for Linux is currently in beta.
I guess it will priced similarly.
Yes, it includes CLIM 2.
Yes, you can deliver applications royalty free.
Yes, it has an IDE.
http://www.harlequin.com/products/ads/lisp/
http://services.harlequin.com/lisp/lwl.nsf/RegistrationPersonal?OpenForm
Mark Carroll
(snip)
>Amazon always says "4 to 6 weeks", even if they know that the shipment
>will arrive tomorrow. Does it take them that long to reprogram their
>computer?
Nonsense - that's been by far the minority of books I've ordered from
them - for instance, the first language book that I could think of,
"C: A Reference Manual", is claimed to ship in two to three days.
Certainly, number of in-print books and their expected delivery time
is not a bad way of getting a first estimate for the 'health' of a
language! Counting the number of currently-supported compilers you
could use to produce marketable software isn't a bad one either.
[ followups trimmed ]
-- Mark
Kucera, Rich
> * Andrew Cooke <and...@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk>
> | I get the impression that Lisp is on the way out.
>
> wouldn't see a huge amount of books on neurosurgery for
> dummies in 21 days or whatever. it's just plain inappropriate, and
it's
> intentionally out of people's reach. Lisp is somewhat like that.
Yeah, had the opportunity to work with a couple Lisp experts a decade
ago, those guys were brilliant and remote. I was and am a
"mass-educated"
type, and failed to see the opportunity to pick their brains for all
it was worth, and though I was good at Lisping and got Flavors, was
consumed by the Unix/C market after the project ended. Can't complain,
was lucky for a while.
Fernando Mato Mira
> Yes, you can deliver applications royalty free.
Can you use LOAD-FILE royalty-free?
Bernd Paysan
Ullrich Hoffmann wrote a Lisp in Forth, but IIRC, like many Forth
projects, he didn't really finish it. Alex Burger wrote and uses a
Lisp/Forth crossing (everything is list/symbol/number, but syntax is
Forth, or at least very Forth-like), called Lifo and Teatime (same, but
implemented in Java, with Java objects as first class data types).
IMHO Forth and Lisp are much closer to each other than to the rest of
the language space (Algol, Fortran, Cobol and derivatives).
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Will Hartung
>Rainer Joswig wrote:
>
>> Yes, you can deliver applications royalty free.
>
>Can you use LOAD-FILE royalty-free?
IIRC, essentially, as long as your "product" isn't a "Lisp Development
Environment" or similiar, you can pretty much do anything you want.
I do get the impression that there may be some kind of extra licensing
involved with deployment of the Enterprise Edition however (i.e. the CORBA
stuff I imagine), but I'm not sure.
I was going to upgrade to 4.1 but they removed the ODBC drivers and put that
into their Enterprise Edition. But with the free ODBC layer available,
perhaps I'll reconsider.
Best Regards,
Will Hartung
(vft...@home.com)
Kucera, Rich
> Without free or low priced complete lisp systems (a system
> without a GUI
> is not a system in todays market) available, the market will
> not grow.
The opportunity is there with CL-HTTP...a web system--the GUI part is
the
browser + HTML. Stear clear of javascript and non-standard tags,
just don't go there. Stick to fundamental page layout and server
round-trip.
Frames are clunky.
Bernd Paysan
> prefer to use freeware; if you ask me, it is that practice which hurts
> the community most of all. People need to either contribute money (or
> public effort, if they insist on using publicware) but they should not
> expect to just "consume" without putting something back and have the
> community survive.
I hear this in the Forth community (which is also "dying" with
increasing traffic for 10 years now ;-), too, but IMHO, that's bull.
*If* freeware products are good enough (or better) than commercial
offerings, commercial offerings aren't worth the price. And since one of
the most popular C/C++ compiler also is freeware (GCC), I suppose C is
dying rapidly, too, eh? Ok, I must admit that the community there works:
they give back a lot of C code. But they also give back Lisp and Scheme
code, and encourage the use of these languages by embedding them as
macro languages in killer applications like Emacs or the Gimp (although
the latter is now getting a Perl interface to have a "more popular" and
"widely known" language it it - urgh. I'd take Scheme over Perl any
day).
IMHO the situation as it is - we see generations of inferiour languages
hyped and passing away, replaced by another inferiour language, while we
know what the "one real true thing" is - this situation has a cause. The
masses aren't intelligent. Not above average - that's why they are
called masses. They want authorities and follow rules (think of the
"Life of Brian" scene of the masses in front of his house). That's how
mass-market languages are created: they have rules (strong typing!
static checks!), and they have restrictions (no run-time generated code!
not extensible by the user - at least not in creative ways!!).
People don't want to think. They don't want to choose one of 23
user-level implementations of OOP, or even decide to write their own
one. They want to have a single standard OOP. Everybody will request
that his feature need of the day is included in the single standard. And
finally, they'll realize that they need to start over again, because
this particular language converted to an unmaintainible mess. But
they'll never come to the point to allow the user to add his feature of
the day. That would be chaos. And that would be just like the dying
languages, Lisp, etc. ...
Samuel A. Falvo II
>macro languages in killer applications like Emacs or the Gimp (although
>the latter is now getting a Perl interface to have a "more popular" and
>"widely known" language it it - urgh. I'd take Scheme over Perl any
>day).
Is "Getting" a perl interface? What's taking them so long? The Python
interface has already been out for quite some time. ;)
==========================================================================
KC5TJA/6 | -| TEAM DOLPHIN |-
DM13 | Samuel A. Falvo II
QRP-L #1447 | http://www.dolphin.openprojects.net
Oceanside, CA |......................................................
Kucera, Rich
> IMHO the situation as it is - we see generations of inferiour
> languages
> hyped and passing away, replaced by another inferiour
> language, while we
> know what the "one real true thing" is - this situation has a
> cause. The
> masses aren't intelligent. Not above average - that's why they are
> called masses. They want authorities and follow rules (think of the
> "Life of Brian" scene of the masses in front of his house). That's how
> mass-market languages are created: they have rules (strong typing!
> static checks!), and they have restrictions (no run-time
> generated code!
> not extensible by the user - at least not in creative ways!!).
Come now, rules allow for communication to exist at all.
Rules create hierarchical organization which may have
efficiencies over a committee of geniuses. What you're
really implying is the Dilbert Effect...but what that implies
is simply the stratification of knowledge, I may know a lot
about what puts Lisp in a higher class than Java, but I
don't know squat about why my CFO won't pay for it.
I simply have no way of effectively targeting my arguments
in favor of Lisp.
To get beyond this we need to read Carlos Castenada. You
may be able to create your own rules in Lisp, but you can't
make yourself understood without a huge ramp-up time defining
all the terms...and then waiting for the other guy to define
all his/her terms, and then making sure we both understand the
translation mapping between terms which involves more mapping
of meta-terms etc. etc.
There are examples of successes that were community
collaborations
that involve the cooperation of users, domain experts, managers,
designers, and programmers all working together on realistically
scoped
projects (though the last time I was involved in anything like
this
was a Lisp system back in '91). Then there are those examples
which are done by lone programmers that fill a specific need
targeted to a specific platform that are huge successes. Take
TOAD, for example. The guy wrote a lean and mean tool for
Oracle
using Delphi and native Oracle drivers to get the footprint down
to under 1 meg and distributed as shareware. The tool was such
a
huge hit that he was bought out by some vendor and got some very
lucrative IPO deal I'm sure.
> they'll never come to the point to allow the user to add his
> feature of
> the day. That would be chaos. And that would be just like the dying
> languages, Lisp, etc. ...
Chaos is in the eye of the beholder. Would you really want
to be able to add features to Java? I don't think so, you'd
want to be able to use Lisp, right? There's not a
willingness
to look upon one's own creation and see the ugly parts...there
are failures in both camps.
George Neuner
wrote:
> ... people should not lament the passing of things they are not
>willing to invest in. This newsgroup has a number of people
>who my sense is both want a lot of free things and want to debug why
>Lisp is in the trouble it's in.
Agreed.
> ... the fact is that there are a LOT of free offerings of Lisp
>and of good quality.
Now. I remember things being pretty difficult to find in the days
before the World Wide Wait - even with pointers.
George Neuner
<and...@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
>I've read all the responses so far, and I'm pretty convinced that Lisp
>isn't that poorly (thank-you!). On the other hand, a couple of posts
>seem to reflect a certain ghetto mentality, especially this last one:
>
> Lisp is not the kind of language that insecure losers would use.
> people do not want to learn Lisp because they stand a better chance
"Loser" is an old technical term which means roughly "one who is
unskilled and not bright enough to know it". It is not the same
pejorative that people throw around today - its a different one :)
Mike McDonald
gne...@dyn.com (George Neuner) writes:
> On Thu, 15 Jul 1999 10:02:20 GMT, Andrew Cooke
> <and...@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>I've read all the responses so far, and I'm pretty convinced that Lisp
>>isn't that poorly (thank-you!). On the other hand, a couple of posts
>>seem to reflect a certain ghetto mentality, especially this last one:
>>
>> Lisp is not the kind of language that insecure losers would use.
>> people do not want to learn Lisp because they stand a better chance
>
>
> "Loser" is an old technical term which means roughly "one who is
> unskilled and not bright enough to know it". It is not the same
> pejorative that people throw around today - its a different one :)
But I thought that version was spelled "luser".
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Csaba Raduly
>
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
>
> Since Forth is still being
> used, I can deduce that Lisp is still being used, even tho I
> don't know where.
In EMACS, of course (if you're talking about the language
with the parentheses :-).
Csaba
--
Csaba Raduly, Software Developer (OS/2), Sophos Anti-Virus
mailto:csaba....@sophos.com http://www.sophos.com/
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Life is complex, with real and imaginary parts.
Samuel A. Falvo II
>In EMACS, of course (if you're talking about the language
>with the parentheses :-).
EMACS is making the transition to Scheme, I believe, because of a simpler
(read: easier to maintain) implementation. Also, the GIMP uses Scheme as
its native scripting language.
Sunil Mishra
Doesn't that refer to the user losing in some system call failures?
Sunil
Sunil Mishra
I believe they charge *much* more if you want the ability to compile
generated source files in the delivered application. For instance,
compiling a rules file in an expert system.
Sunil
Craig Brozefsky
> On Thu, 15 Jul 1999 18:57:07 +0100, Csaba Raduly <csaba....@sophos.com> wrote:
> >In EMACS, of course (if you're talking about the language
> >with the parentheses :-).
>
> EMACS is making the transition to Scheme, I believe, because of a simpler
> (read: easier to maintain) implementation.
You have obviously never taken a look at eval.c in Guile. I'm not
sure you could argue that it simplifies anything.
It is a ways off before we see guile in emacs. Year minimum.
--
Craig Brozefsky <cr...@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
I say woe unto those who are wise in their own eyes, and yet
imprudent in 'dem outside -Sizzla
Christopher R. Barry
> I called Franz a while back to find out about how much it would cost me
> to get a Lisp system for use on my Linux box as a learning tool (I am
> in grad school). I wanted to be able to use CLIM. The cost was
> somewhere upwards of $1500.00.
That is incredibly cheap for them. The usual quote for the
Professional Edition (their most basic commercial offering) is $4200,
and with CLIM added on it's in the 7s (if I remember MikeMac
correctly...). Of course, the only accurate source of pricing
information for Franz's products is Franz....
For less than the price you mentioned (I'm pretty sure...) you can get
LispWorks with CLIM and deliver applications royalty free. (IIRC I
think I read when I downloaded the Linux Beta that they bundle it with
their Professional version....)
> Because of this price tag I will not be in the position to recommend
> CLIM to some future employer. I will not be in a position to know
> its strengths or weaknesses. The Lisp community may have just cost
> themselves quite a bit of money; there is no way to tell.
Its funny that an old Lisp Machine is the cheapest way to get your
hands on CLIM. For not too much more you can get an iMac and MCL with
CLIM. I also think that a CLIM to use under similar terms as the
current Trial/Free editions could only help Lisp. A lot of people that
buy licenses do not buy CLIM as an add-on, so only a small fraction of
the people that read this group and Lispers as a whole have real
exposure and knowledge of CLIM. The rare CLIM questions here go
unanswered, or people get referred to this voluminous tome known as
_The CLIM User's Guide_. There are no decent (any?) tutorials on the
web for CLIM and there are no books at Amazon that cover CLIM, nor is
there likely any market for a CLIM book.
If there was a Trial CLIM, this what I see happening:
1. Many licensees and non-licensees alike would at least _try_
CLIM. If they try CLIM, they'll know what the're missing out on by
speaking CORBA or sockets or whatever to Swing to do their GUI
instead (or something...).
2. Tutorials on the web would appear. In time there may even be a
market for someone to write a good book.
3. Interest about it would increase and questions here would start
to get asked more and actually answered, thus increasing the value
of vendor's CLIM offerings by there being an actual community of
CLIM users, just like this group and the general community of Lisp
users increases the value of their Lisp offerings. In time there
could even start to be annual CLIM User's Group meetings (like the
LUGM), who knows?
4. Free CLIM software would appear, giving real good examples with
source of how to do cool things with CLIM, showing how the
presentation facility makes GUIs that belong to the more
sophisticated classes of human-computer-interaction about 10 times
easier to program and require about 5-10% the code.
> Without free or low priced complete lisp systems (a system without a
> GUI is not a system in todays market) available, the market will not
> grow.
Everyone's Free/Trial edition except for the Franz Linux/BSD one has
some form of proprietary-API interface builder included. With CMUCL
you can use the (kinda buggy and slow, but powerful) Garnet. None of
these support the presentation facility of CLIM, which is what makes
CLIM so cool.
If you read some of the posts that touched on CLIM over the past few
days (from Nick Levine and others), it would seem that CLIM is not
profitable for any vendor (gee I wonder why...) and that they would
rather just not maintain it and let it die.
Christopher
Reini Urban
>you can use the linux trial edition. you can use clisp or cmucl.
>so there are systems you can use. i agree that gui construction ought
>to be a natural for lisp and that the trial editions do not make it as
>readily available as, e.g., visual basic[2].
>[2] visual basic while a weak programming language gives access to
> many gui building functions.
acl5 for windows has a V-alike GUI builder, just a little bit better.
in a free trial edition.
visual basic for windows has no free trial edition.
unix is a different story, but there you have at least garnet for free.
--
Reini
Jean-Francois Brouillet
wrote:
[snipped]
> I hear this in the Forth community (which is also "dying" with
> increasing traffic for 10 years now ;-), too, but IMHO, that's bull.
[snipped]
I'm a bit sad to see one of the most creative clf contributor
under the light of the most narrowly minded guy:
> People don't want to think. They don't want to choose one of 23
> user-level implementations of OOP, or even decide to write their own
> one. They want to have a single standard OOP. Everybody will request
> that his feature need of the day is included in the single standard. And
> finally, they'll realize that they need to start over again, because
> this particular language converted to an unmaintainible mess. But
> they'll never come to the point to allow the user to add his feature of
> the day. That would be chaos. And that would be just like the dying
> languages, Lisp, etc. ...
If what you are alluding to is that "people" (whoever they are, since
no qualification is given) don't want to think about how implementing
the division each time they want to compute some ratio, then I guess
they are right. If those same people don't want to think about how
to implement an array each time they want...err! an array! I still do
think they are right. Not even speaking about anything more clever
having passed the darwinian selection: records, lists, nodes...
Maybe "People" want to think with _abstractions_ something that Forth
can deliver, but that Forthers have consistently failed to deliver over
the past 25 years. It doesn't matter whether we have the choice of
23 OOP system, if none of them is either good or documented enough to
attract the interest of a wide audience, which, in turn, would promote
more attention.
This attitude, "The Users Are Just Stupid Idiots" is so well encroached
these days, that I'm wondering if you're not more a Linux geek (Damn
the user!) than a Forther (Damn the abstraction!).
Too bad to see talents blinded by selfish, elitist considerations.
Early answers are...early answers
Wrong answers are...wrong answers
George Neuner
wrote:
>> "Loser" is an old technical term which means roughly "one who is
>> unskilled and not bright enough to know it". It is not the same
>> pejorative that people throw around today - its a different one :)
>
> But I thought that version was spelled "luser".
>
You could be right - I've heard it said a number of times (fortunately
not [directly] to me) but the only place I've actually seen it written
is in Levy's book "Hackers". He spelled it conventionally.
Christopher R. Barry
> mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
>
> > In article <378e0a9b.157564265@asgard>,
> > gne...@dyn.com (George Neuner) writes:
> > > On Thu, 15 Jul 1999 10:02:20 GMT, Andrew Cooke
> > > <and...@andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > >>I've read all the responses so far, and I'm pretty convinced that Lisp
> > >>isn't that poorly (thank-you!). On the other hand, a couple of posts
> > >>seem to reflect a certain ghetto mentality, especially this last one:
> > >>
> > >> Lisp is not the kind of language that insecure losers would use.
> > >> people do not want to learn Lisp because they stand a better chance
> > >
> > >
> > > "Loser" is an old technical term which means roughly "one who is
> > > unskilled and not bright enough to know it". It is not the same
> > > pejorative that people throw around today - its a different one :)
> >
> > But I thought that version was spelled "luser".
>
> Doesn't that refer to the user losing in some system call failures?
"luser" AFAIK comes from sysadmin culture e.g, "My lusers are always
complaining that disk quotas are too small and that I should install
Emacs so that the machine will be slow for everyone else."
Christopher
Rainer Joswig
> Its funny that an old Lisp Machine is the cheapest way to get your
> hands on CLIM.
Additonally: Symbolics Genera 8.3 and Open Genera 2.0 come with CLIM sources.
Digitool sells a source+site license for CLIM.
> exposure and knowledge of CLIM. The rare CLIM questions here go
> unanswered, or people get referred to this voluminous tome known as
> _The CLIM User's Guide_.
There is the CLIM specification and Symbolics has its
CLIM documentation.
http://www2.cons.org:8000/clim-spec/cover.html
> There are no decent (any?) tutorials on the
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/%7Emoeller/uims-clim/clim-intro.html
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/clim-examples/
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/clim-examples/clim-examples-images/screen-shots.html
http://www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ifi/is/Lehre/Vorlesung/symbolv/clim/handout.html
http://www.sover.net/~nichael/work/portfolio/index.html
ftp://openmap.bbn.com/pub/customer-redirect/kanderson/scigraph-19981027.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.digitool.com/pub/clim/
> nor is there likely any market for a CLIM book.
There is.
> If you read some of the posts that touched on CLIM over the past few
> days (from Nick Levine and others), it would seem that CLIM is not
> profitable for any vendor (gee I wonder why...) and that they would
> rather just not maintain it and let it die.
I still have the feeling some have sabotaged it.
AFAIK Harlequin had a CLIM-based development environment -
it never surfaced.
Ask one of the frequent posters (from the US ;-) ) - I heard
that he has written an Emacs-like editor in CLIM ...
Reuben Thomas
>kc5...@dolphin.openprojects.net (Samuel A. Falvo II) writes:
>
>> On Thu, 15 Jul 1999 18:57:07 +0100, Csaba Raduly <csaba....@sophos.com> wrote:
>>
>> EMACS is making the transition to Scheme, I believe, because of a simpler
>> (read: easier to maintain) implementation.
>
>You have obviously never taken a look at eval.c in Guile. I'm not
>sure you could argue that it simplifies anything.
I may just be muddying the waters, but I read Csaba's comment as meaning
that it's easier to implement Emacs in Scheme than in Lisp, and Craig's as
that it's no easier to implement Scheme than Lisp. These seem to be at
cross-purposes.
--
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | certain, a. insufficiently analysed
Christopher R. Barry
> Additonally: Symbolics Genera 8.3 and Open Genera 2.0 come with CLIM sources.
> Digitool sells a source+site license for CLIM.
>
> > exposure and knowledge of CLIM. The rare CLIM questions here go
> > unanswered, or people get referred to this voluminous tome known as
> > _The CLIM User's Guide_.
>
> There is the CLIM specification and Symbolics has its
> CLIM documentation.
The CLIM specification is less usable as a reference than the CLIM
User's Guide. Neither have any tutorial value other than in the
HyperSpec sense. The Symbolics CLIM documention is essentially an
older, slightly different (from the Harlequin one) copy of the CLIM
User's Guide, combined with a very brief tutorial on defining
application frames and using presentations. It gives you just enough
information so that you can get started and know how to create the
support code to try out a function from the User's Guide.
> > There are no decent (any?) tutorials on the
>
> http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/%7Emoeller/uims-clim/clim-intro.html
> http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/clim-examples/
> http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moeller/clim-examples/clim-examples-images/screen-shots.html
>
I've seen these before from altavista searches. They either describe
CLIM and some of its concepts, or give a little demo/example code but
its not that great.
http://www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ifi/is/Lehre/Vorlesung/symbolv/clim/handout.html
That one is 99.9% German. Remember, not all of us can speak it. :-)
There wasn't any source code in it either and it's probably not that
great anyways.
> http://www.sover.net/~nichael/work/portfolio/index.html
> ftp://openmap.bbn.com/pub/customer-redirect/kanderson/scigraph-19981027.tar.gz
These are just some source and technical papers of a lot of the CLIM
stuff the BBN is now (I hear) converting to Java. Nothing tutorial or
very useful/usable about it.
> ftp://ftp.digitool.com/pub/clim/
That looks like the same ancient CLIM demo stuff you can get from the
CMU AI Repository.
> > nor is there likely any market for a CLIM book.
>
> There is.
What makes you think there is? I'd like to believe that that is true,
but can find anything to convince myself.
> > If you read some of the posts that touched on CLIM over the past few
> > days (from Nick Levine and others), it would seem that CLIM is not
> > profitable for any vendor (gee I wonder why...) and that they would
> > rather just not maintain it and let it die.
>
> I still have the feeling some have sabotaged it.
>
> AFAIK Harlequin had a CLIM-based development environment -
> it never surfaced.
>
> Ask one of the frequent posters (from the US ;-) ) - I heard
> that he has written an Emacs-like editor in CLIM ...
Zmacs? :-) After having used a Symbolics so much, I wonder why none of
the vendors have ever made a CLIM-based listener and editor so that
you can do some of the same cool stuff. The Symbolics Dynamic Windows
(same CLIM presentations functionality for those that don't know) UI
is pushing two decades of age now. Time for a vendor to offer us one
with 1/10th the functionality and coolness and 1/2 the efficiency.
Christopher
Mike McDonald
cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
> jos...@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
>> > If you read some of the posts that touched on CLIM over the past few
>> > days (from Nick Levine and others), it would seem that CLIM is not
>> > profitable for any vendor (gee I wonder why...) and that they would
>> > rather just not maintain it and let it die.
>>
>> I still have the feeling some have sabotaged it.
I thought I was the most cynical about CLIM around here but I wouldn't go
quite that far. At least, not deliberately sabotaged. Mostly I think the
vendors just didn't know what to do with it. The joint ownership of it may
also be complicating things. Just figuring out who owns the thing probably
would keep some lawyers busy for quite a while. (I don't know what the
contractual agreement was between the original CLIM partners. I'm only
speculating that it'd keep any one of them from just releasing the sources. [I
do believe that there are other arraingements that could be pursued other
releasing the source to everyone if thecontract is this way.] It'd probably
require all six of them to agree to it. Finding everyone is probably a major
task.)
>> AFAIK Harlequin had a CLIM-based development environment -
>> it never surfaced.
>>
>> Ask one of the frequent posters (from the US ;-) ) - I heard
>> that he has written an Emacs-like editor in CLIM ...
>
> Zmacs? :-) After having used a Symbolics so much, I wonder why none of
> the vendors have ever made a CLIM-based listener and editor so that
> you can do some of the same cool stuff.
CLIM is a complicated system that's expensive to support. The vendors want
to see sufficient customer demand before they invest their limited resources
in pursuing it. Since it is a complicated system and the potential customers
don't know enough about it except the cost, they're not eager to commit their
limited resources and demand it. As a result, we have a sort of stand off.
Each side is waiting for the other side to blink. It'll take something drastic
to break the jam, either a customer with a lot of money and guts or a vendor
willing to take a risk. At the moment, I don't have much faith that either
will appear.
Mike McDonald
mik...@mikemac.com
Sunil Mishra
> CLIM is a complicated system that's expensive to support. The vendors want
> to see sufficient customer demand before they invest their limited resources
> in pursuing it. Since it is a complicated system and the potential customers
> don't know enough about it except the cost, they're not eager to commit their
> limited resources and demand it. As a result, we have a sort of stand off.
> Each side is waiting for the other side to blink. It'll take something drastic
> to break the jam, either a customer with a lot of money and guts or a vendor
> willing to take a risk. At the moment, I don't have much faith that either
> will appear.
>
> Mike McDonald
> mik...@mikemac.com
(Sorry about the rambling note. Its getting late, and the disorganized
message merely reflects the swirling confusion in my mind.)
I've had some experience with CLIM, and am one of the poor souls that tried
posting to get some answers. The symbolics CLIM 1.0 book that I managed to
find is by far the best documentation I have been able to get my hands
on. And it certainly is not from lack of searching.
There are two problems that I see with CLIM:
1. Poor documentation, "non-standard" paradigm.
2. Cost.
Consider a programmer (even a Lisp programmer) that has never played with
CLIM, and has to write an interface. As good as this programmer might be at
Lisp, I believe that she/he would have a very difficult time learning CLIM,
simply because its approach to building a GUI is very different from
current practice.
The one thing that I haven't yet found is a good, clear and concise
description of what you can do with CLIM that would be hard with another
GUI environment. (I had seen one article, I don't remember where, that
attempted this, but knowing what I do now I felt it only touched on a small
subset of CLIM's facilities.) Even if you know what CLIM can do for you, it
doesn't help if you don't know how to do it. And we get back to tutorials
and documentation.
The first couple of times I tried creating a GUI in CLIM, the results were,
well, just short of disasterous. I simply didn't understand how the thing
worked. In most present day GUI's, you place widgets on screen, and attach
code to those widgets. That makes getting a basic GUI together (which is
what I wanted) rather straightforward. You can even throw together a GUI
builder relatively easily. (Witness Allegro CL and MCL.) Of course,
extending it to handle complex interactions of the type presentations
enable takes an incredible amount of work.
I once tried to explain to an HCI graduate student CLIM can potentially do,
but I had a really hard time convincing her of its utility. Partly because
I didn't know enough to do a good job of it. For what I did get across, I
got the response, "That paradigm in interface design was abandoned ages
ago." Given current practice, CLIM is hard, CLIM is mysterious, and without
decent tutorials that clearly get across its strengths, CLIM is worse than
GUI's available on non-Lisp environments. I'd like to say I don't agree
with this position, but without decent documentation that clearly
demonstrates the power of CLIM (as opposed to toy examples and code without
any documentation), I find myself in partial agreement. I once tried to
create a draggable object on screen in CLIM. Not pleasant.
The second problem, cost, I find equally troubling. If I were not a
student, I would not dream of trying to acquire and experiment with a copy
of CLIM. And to reiterate what others have said, high price would be a
reason to not get my hands dirty. I have a dozen other GUI's out there that
I can experiment with for free, and one of them is bound to at least
partially meet my needs. What might possibly lead me to believe that CLIM
is fantastically better than anything I have tried? Especially in the
absence of documentation? I see no reason whatsoever that anyone might
consider using CLIM for building an interface.
Soon I shall no longer be a student. I suspect I shall not be fooling
around with CLIM that much longer. Most present-day (deliverable) programs
are complex enough that a command line interface is insufficient. Lisp
potentially has a great GUI environment in CLIM, only it is next to
impossible for the average user (programmer) to play with. And for many,
this may be reason enough to drop lisp and look at an environment that's
more accessible.
In my undergrad school, the professor with whom I was working was
*relieved* to be able to abandon CLIM 1.x. He moved to Allegro CL when
Lucid went under, and loved the GUI builder. It wasn't more powerful,
merely less buggy and obtuse. I can't compare CLIM 1.x and 2.x, but 2.x
appears to be usable. But still obtuse.
A closing remark: I want to be able to use a GUI with my lisp programs. I
have to work with enough data and such that having a GUI would greatly ease
my life. I would also like to be able to interface with non-lisp elements
easily and reliably. I have tried running a quicktime movie on an SGI in
lispworks, and it is hell. I don't really *care* if I don't have the
perfect GUI where I can interact with the underlying objects directly. I'd
trade a little simplicity and transparency for that power. (I invite you to
read Don Norman's book, "The design of everyday things" I believe is the
name, to understand why I believe this is important.) Lisp arguably tends
to be on the opaque side, but at least you can get a sense for what the
language is about if you have had a good education in CS and are willing to
read a book or two. Unfortunately, there is no theory of interfaces that
one can learn to understand CLIM. I believe this is a problem that needs
fixing, by either making CLIM more available or accessible, or putting some
effort into a GUI that is easier to implement, debug and use.
Sunil
markku.l...@hybrid.fi
Sunil Mishra <smi...@whizzy.cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
>
>
> The first couple of times I tried creating a GUI in CLIM, the results
were,
> well, just short of disasterous. I simply didn't understand how the
thing
> worked. In most present day GUI's, you place widgets on screen, and
attach
> code to those widgets. That makes getting a basic GUI together (which
is
> what I wanted) rather straightforward. You can even throw together a
GUI
> builder relatively easily. (Witness Allegro CL and MCL.) Of course,
> extending it to handle complex interactions of the type presentations
> enable takes an incredible amount of work.
>
Hmm, I liked the menu user interface what we did in one research project
implementing Common-lisp to C Compiler in AIX 6000 and Sunos.
Basically the definition of menu looked like
(defpresentation map-menu-bar
$(a menu-bar :structure
(("File" (("Save River" cb-save-river)
("Close" close-shell)))
("Edit" (
("Edit Object")
("Delete")
("Generate River" cb-generate-river)
("Deselect" ck-deselect)
))
("View" (("Color Coding ->" (("Ph" (cb-set-color ccf-ph))
("Temperature" (cb-set-color
ccf-temp))
("Flow" (cb-set-color ccf-flow))
("O2" (cb-set-color ccf-o2))
("N" (cb-set-color ccf-n))
("Alarm Index" (cb-set-color
ccf-alarm))))
("Layers ..." cb-layers)
))
("Time" (("Set Simulation Start Time"
tl-set-simulation-start-time)
("Set Simulation End Time" tl-set-simulation-end)))
("Model" (("Run ...")))
("Step" (("Step one delta" run-delta-t)
("Step n deltas" run-delta-many)))
("Status" (("Get simulation status" tl-get-sim-status))))))
It was quite fun to write user interfaces and test them quickly.
heh heh, the compiler beat the s**t out from other CL implementations on
that time in gabriel benchmarks.
Unfortunately one has to life and cannot affort to spend time going
through the code and make the thing to compiler java byte code...
Unfortunately most of the people around doesn't understand, that the CL
could be used in very difficult project.
Or should we be better to say, that the marketing doesn't like the sound
when engineer says "It only interrepts for 1-2 milliseconds to collect
GARGABE"..
"GARBAGE", how in earth we can sell this thing to customers ???
Currently I have spent a year as a member of team designing and
implementing snmp management system with C++,CORBA ,and yack RPC. There
are VERYYYYY many configuration files, which basically define how the
system behaves in the fly, how traps are converted to alarm
notifications, how things are collected, where there are stored etc...
It would have taken maybe 3-6 months to write the whole thing in CL
alone.
We have spent much more..
PKY
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| Also, the GIMP uses Scheme as its native scripting language.
Yeah, but didn't they use "SIOD" as their Scheme?
*Old* syntax, no where near R[45]RS...
-Rob
p.s. Don't get me wrong, SIOD is nice & small, and *fast*-starting.
But picking it for the scripting base of a new tool and then saying
"uses Scheme" makes about as much sense as picking (say) Lisp 1.6 and
then saying "Hey, what are you CL guys complaining about, we used Lisp"...
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Vassil Nikolov
Christopher R. Barry wrote:
> Sunil Mishra <smi...@whizzy.cc.gatech.edu> writes:
>
> > mik...@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) writes:
> >
> > > In article <378e0a9b.157564265@asgard>,
> > > gne...@dyn.com (George Neuner) writes:
[...]
> > > > "Loser" is an old technical term which means roughly "one who is
> > > > unskilled and not bright enough to know it". It is not the same
> > > > pejorative that people throw around today - its a different one :)
> > >
> > > But I thought that version was spelled "luser".
> >
> > Doesn't that refer to the user losing in some system call failures?
>
> "luser" AFAIK comes from sysadmin culture e.g, "My lusers are always
> complaining that disk quotas are too small and that I should install
> Emacs so that the machine will be slow for everyone else."
There is of course an explanation of <luser> in the New Hacker's
Dictionary. I don't have an electronic copy handy; the essence:
A <user>; esp. one who is also a <loser>. [MIT, ca. 1975]
(See entry for full story, and also entries for <loser> and <user>.)
Posted by the Deja mail-to-news gateway.
Vassil Nikolov
Permanent forwarding e-mail: vnik...@poboxes.com
For more: http://www.poboxes.com/vnikolov
Abaci lignei --- programmatici ferrei.
Christopher C Stacy
having to do with UNIX, or with systems that required "admins".
It comes from the hackers at the MIT AI lab about two decades ago.
It comes from the verb "to lose", which means to not succeed, or to be
a bad idea, or perhaps to be slightly clueless, depending on the context.
In particular, the spelling "luser" was a pun on "user", referring to
someone who uses the computer, but who is not what might today be
called a "system wizard" (a kernel developer). It was not particularly
derisive, at least not in a serious way.
The spelling is from the source code of ITS, the PDP-10 (originally PDP-6)
operating system written there. ITS stands for "Incompatible Timesharing System",
and that name is also a joke (referring to the contrast with the CTSS project.)
There was also an ITS system call "LOSE" (or the UUO version ".LOSE")
that terminated a program with an optional error code. On the PDP-10,
test instructions and system-calls PC-skipped on success, so typically
after a system call (such as "OPEN" a file) would be a call to "LOSE".
LUSER was also the name of an ITS application program. Typing the command "LUSER"
would send an interactive message ("Help me -- I'm a luser!") to a special list
of logged-in helpers; it summoned a hacker to help you. Most people who used
this command wondered what an "el-user" was.
Suggesting that this (or any of the other cutsey "hacker" words and
phrases) had anything to do with UNIX, at the time, bring to mind
another word that we used to use a lot. Actually, some years later
we often used the word in sentences that also contained the word "UNIX".
That word is "barf".
Chris
Christopher C Stacy
Jason Trenouth
> AFAIK Harlequin had a CLIM-based development environment -
> it never surfaced.
Yonks ago Fry prototyped some browser/inspector ideas for a Dylan environment
in CLIM but these ideas weren't an entire environment and never made it into
production. I think Scott also wrote a CLIM-based listener to use himself and
share with a couple of other like-minded souls (mostly at 1CC). AFAIK we never
had a whole Lisp environment in CLIM, but perhaps some other tools existed as
well. Most of the CLIM-addicts resided at 1cc, but conversely that place also
had its fair share of EMACS-junkies.
BTW The current Dylan Interactor (aka Listener) has a presentation-style
interface. E.g. You can right click on the results and recursively inspect
them in the listener with successive results being active in the same way.
__Jason
Lars Marius Garshol
* Mike McDonald
|
| But I thought that version was spelled "luser".
* Sunil Mishra
|
| Doesn't that refer to the user losing in some system call failures?
This expands on what Christopher Stacy wrote, and seems to have some
pre-history:
<URL: http://www.wins.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/l/luser.html >
--Lars M.
Anton Ertl
Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net> writes:
> Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> of
> a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on the
> shelves
> of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp and Scheme are still
> alive with about half to one third as many books as Fortran,
> while Fortran has about one tenth as many books as the big guys
> like C, Java, Visual Basic and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
Your result may be biased by your selection of bookstores. They'll
probably have to close MIT before LISP and Scheme books will vanish
from the Cambridge (MA) bookstores.
I was just at two bookstores near TU Wien. I did not see LISP,
Scheme, or Forth books. Interestingly, I did not even see a Prolog
book, although we have an obligatory Prolog course in our curriculum;
apparently the course notes are good enough. I saw books for some not
so popular languages: Ada, Haskell, Icon, Miranda, ML, Modula-2,
Oberon.
Concerning the metric you use to evaluate the health of a language: I
think we have now enough experience to conclude that it is wrong. You
whined about the lack of Forth books five years ago, but I see no
indication that Forth is any worse off than then, on the contrary,
other indicators are usually positive: clf traffic has grown, there
are fewer "Forth is dying" postings, implementations for new platforms
(e.g., PalmPilot, Lego Mindstorms) are demanded and supplied quickly,
participation at EuroForth is stable...
> When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
> about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
> Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
> to the bookstore and buy a book about it.
And later you claim that Amazon.com is not a book store for this
purpose. Why? Sure, they cannot browse, but they have your
recommendation, and in the case of the Forth Programmer's Handbook
AFAIK they can even download an evaluation copy.
Moreover, there are several on-line Forth courses, so why would they
need to buy a book in a bookstore to learn Forth?
Using my metric of postings in comp.lang groups, here are the postings
present on news.tuwien.ac.at on July 11, 1997 and July 16, 1999. You
will notice that a lot of newsgroups have vanished, that's because
this newsserver has dropped groups that nobody here reads:
1997 1999
3 comp.lang.JavaScript
476 268 comp.lang.ada
206 comp.lang.apl
6 2 comp.lang.asm
786 581 comp.lang.asm.x86
78 comp.lang.asm370
117 144 comp.lang.awk
1 comp.lang.basic
447 comp.lang.basic.misc
114 646 comp.lang.basic.visual
282 comp.lang.basic.visual.3rdparty
691 760 comp.lang.basic.visual.database
3115 3429 comp.lang.basic.visual.misc
39 comp.lang.beta
2458 2471 comp.lang.c
2286 2518 comp.lang.c++
59 comp.lang.c++.leda
328 568 comp.lang.c++.moderated
51 63 comp.lang.c.moderated
968 comp.lang.clarion
731 655 comp.lang.clipper
224 625 comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects
32 comp.lang.clos
23 comp.lang.clu
485 comp.lang.cobol
5 comp.lang.cplu
5 comp.lang.crass
40 comp.lang.dylan
334 152 comp.lang.eiffel
6 comp.lang.for
233 470 comp.lang.forth
53 comp.lang.forth.mac
421 473 comp.lang.fortran
57 87 comp.lang.functional
31 comp.lang.hermes
31 28 comp.lang.icon
32 comp.lang.idl
122 183 comp.lang.idl-pvwave
309 252 comp.lang.java
815 1318 comp.lang.java.advocacy
12 comp.lang.java.announce
137 72 comp.lang.java.api
118 178 comp.lang.java.beans
210 comp.lang.java.corba
2 comp.lang.java.database
277 394 comp.lang.java.databases
4 comp.lang.java.developer
391 1045 comp.lang.java.gui
772 1625 comp.lang.java.help
15 comp.lang.java.javascript
84 171 comp.lang.java.machine
208 comp.lang.java.misc
3440 3864 comp.lang.java.programmer
194 212 comp.lang.java.security
40 comp.lang.java.setup
223 295 comp.lang.java.softwaretools
259 comp.lang.java.tech
1732 2869 comp.lang.javascript
16 comp.lang.limbo
197 791 comp.lang.lisp
24 comp.lang.lisp.franz
46 comp.lang.lisp.mcl
25 comp.lang.lisp.x
130 comp.lang.logo
136 110 comp.lang.misc
14 comp.lang.ml
88 comp.lang.modula2
69 comp.lang.modula3
171 comp.lang.mumps
72 comp.lang.oberon
66 101 comp.lang.objective-c
55 26 comp.lang.pascal
69 comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso
664 297 comp.lang.pascal.borland
23 51 comp.lang.pascal.delphi
163 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.advocacy
21 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.announce
49 21 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components
306 140 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components.misc
222 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components.usage
306 77 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.components.writing
1 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.database
888 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.databases
2061 864 comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc
67 comp.lang.pascal.mac
221 111 comp.lang.pascal.misc
56 165 comp.lang.perl
7 1 comp.lang.perl.announce
1865 4223 comp.lang.perl.misc
260 comp.lang.perl.moderated
256 411 comp.lang.perl.modules
115 232 comp.lang.perl.tk
41 comp.lang.pl1
28 comp.lang.pop
284 252 comp.lang.postscript
77 comp.lang.prograph
83 97 comp.lang.prolog
404 999 comp.lang.python
141 155 comp.lang.rexx
3 comp.lang.rexx.tso
4 comp.lang.rexx.vm
26 51 comp.lang.sather
160 178 comp.lang.scheme
32 comp.lang.scheme.c
26 12 comp.lang.scheme.scsh
491 430 comp.lang.smalltalk
737 1235 comp.lang.tcl
23 7 comp.lang.tcl.announce
95 comp.lang.verilog
155 190 comp.lang.vhdl
2 comp.lang.visual
44 380 comp.lang.visual.basic
260 209 comp.lang.vrml
According to these numbers, both clf and cll traffic has grown a lot
in these two years, so I doubt that these languages are dying.
For more statistics, take a look at
http://metalab.unc.edu/usenet-i/hier-s/comp.lang.html. E.g., it
claims that clf has 24000 readers, and that cll has 31000 readers.
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
Chuck Fry
Christopher R. Barry <cba...@2xtreme.net> wrote:
>Zmacs? :-) After having used a Symbolics so much, I wonder why none of
>the vendors have ever made a CLIM-based listener and editor so that
>(same CLIM presentations functionality for those that don't know) UI
>is pushing two decades of age now. Time for a vendor to offer us one
>with 1/10th the functionality and coolness and 1/2 the efficiency.
A couple of nits to pick:
- As I (vaguely) recall, DW was introduced with Genera 7.0, in about
1986 (or maybe late '85). That makes it a teenager, but not 20 years
old.
- I think you mean "Time for a vendor [...] with *twice* the
efficiency." Or are you being sarcastic?
- Some of you might recall that the initial release of DW was so
inefficient that it brought the mightiest Lisp machines of the time to
their knees. It wasn't until the next point release that DW was made
remotely efficient, but by that time few people cared, because its
previous (lack of) performance had left such a bad impression on many
users that they turned it off out of habit. In later releases DW became
very speedy, and extremely useful.
Ah, for the good old days...
-- Chuck, ex-Symboolean
--
Chuck Fry -- Jack of all trades, master of none
chu...@chucko.com (text only please) chuc...@home.com (MIME enabled)
Lisp bigot, mountain biker, car nut, sometime guitarist and photographer
The addresses above are real. All spammers will be reported to their ISPs.
T. X. Puckett
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
& According to these numbers, both clf and cll traffic has grown a lot
& in these two years, so I doubt that these languages are dying.
The true question is, is the growth rate of comp.lang.forth greater
than or less than the growth rate of Usenet traffic in general? I
wouldn't say that more articles in, for example, talk.bizarre means
that the world is necessarily getting more bizarre. I'd say rather
that more bizarre people are posting more. What's the average
increase in posts in *lang* groups, and where does comp.lang.forth
stand on the curve?
--
U. Z. Puckett replace "sendnospam" with "puckett"
Barry
Forth. Inc (www.forth.inc) on Wednesday and it's been sitting on my desk
since this morning. (Friday). So it's available and it looks pretty good so
far.
Barry
Michael Coughlin <m-cou...@ne.mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:378CC969...@ne.mediaone.net...
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
>
> > Michael Coughlin wrote in message <378B405C...@ne.mediaone.net>...
> > >... Counting versions is not the way to tell the health
> > >of a computer language. Count the number of textbooks on
> > >the shelves of bookstores intead. I conclude that Lisp
> > >and Scheme are still alive with about half to one third
> > >as many books as Fortran, while Fortran has about one tenth
> > >as many books as the big guys like C, Java, Visual Basic
> > >and C++. Forth comes out at zero.
>
> > > When I meet people who tell me they want to learn all
> > >about computing, including programming, I want to say learn
> > >Forth. But I know that woun't work since they can't even go
> > >to the bookstore and buy a book about it. Well at least they
> > >can still get some nice books about Logo to get then
> > >started.
>
> > Is Amazon a bookstore? Several Forth books there.
>
> Amazon is not a bookstore. You can't drop in and
> browse. If you don't know what Forth is, or think that Forth
> isn't used anymore, you woun't notice a book about it by
> accident when you're looking for some other topic on
> programming. You can't just buy a book because you have it
> in your hot little hand and it looks interesting. You can't
> wrap it up and take it right home. People who don't even have an
> account to access amazon.com and the web are the easiest to
> influence to at least take a look at Forth. They have not
> learned the bad habits of other programming languages and can
> immediately appreciate the advantages of Forth.
>
> I just looked for Forth books on amazon.com. Yes there
> are several listings. There is only one listed as being in
> print, and they say expect delivery within 4 to 6 weeks. There
> are also listings for books by Leo Brodie. When I clicked on
> "Thinking Forth" I got nothing but a system error. There are
> five separate listings for Leo Brodie's book -- "Starting
> Forth". That's reasonable since it is at least five times better
> than the average book on programming. But its out of print. Its
> available only by a special search. It will take them weeks to
> find it or tell you if its not available. They don't tell you to
> get it faster from the Forth Interest Group in California,
> http://www.fig.org/ (at least until their special printing runs
> out). Relying on amazon.com to sell Forth textbooks is not a
> good thing. It would be better to have a publisher promoting the
> book and getting it into bookstores.
>
> Elizabeth Rather is much too shy and modest. She failed to
> mention her own book the "Forth Programmers' Handbook". So I'll
> tell everyone that it is the one Forth textbook that is in print
> and for sale at amazon.com. When I go to my local technical
> bookstores to see if it has finally arrived on the shelves (it
> hasn't), I find instead books on the equally neglected computer
> languages Lisp, Scheme and Logo. I think that Lisp and its
> relatives are much more lively than Forth since they still have
> recently revised textbooks for sale. Since Forth is still being
> used, I can deduce that Lisp is still being used, even tho I
> don't know where. But how long will Forth last without at least
> a few easily found textbooks?
> I wish old Forth programmers would become inspired by Lisp
> programmers to write textbooks so they would be able to train
> their replacements.
>
> --
> Michael Coughlin m-cou...@ne.mediaone.com Cambridge, MA USA
>
Hartmann Schaffer
gne...@dyn.com (George Neuner) writes:
> On Wed, 14 Jul 1999 17:35:09 GMT, Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ... people should not lament the passing of things they are not
>>willing to invest in. This newsgroup has a number of people
>>who my sense is both want a lot of free things and want to debug why
>>Lisp is in the trouble it's in.
>
> Agreed.
The problem is that the cost to investigate whether its worth investing
in is somewhat steep.
--
Hartmann Schaffer
It is better to fill your days with life than your life with days
Bernd Paysan
> Is "Getting" a perl interface? What's taking them so long? The Python
> interface has already been out for quite some time. ;)
They seem to have problems getting the Gtk.pm package compiled and
installed properly (although I must say that the last version I tried
worked fine - so at least for me, the unstable version of Gtk has a Perl
interface).
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Bernd Paysan
> This attitude, "The Users Are Just Stupid Idiots" is so well encroached
> these days, that I'm wondering if you're not more a Linux geek (Damn
> the user!) than a Forther (Damn the abstraction!).
>
> Too bad to see talents blinded by selfish, elitist considerations.
This is really getting political. I think the elitism of my generation
is a counter-reaction to the egalitarism of the '68 generation. It was a
nice idea, but it didn't work. Men are not equal - they are not even
created equal (different genes, different upbringing, different
teaching, etc.). There are brights and stupids. Talents are rare, and
worse, they all limit themselves to one or a few areas. You can't talk
to all people using the same language.
There is nothing wrong with the users being "stupid idiots" (compared to
the gurus). They may have other talents, and then, we know that they
need just a lot of hand-holding. There aren't just as many natural born
kernel hackers out. It just works better if your model of the world
reflects reality instead of an ideal state.
In fact, the Linuxer's attitude stems from assuming that the users
aren't just stupid idiots. That's why Linux is "difficult" to install
and has that load of "cryptic" commands, and all the man pages are so
hard to read.
I'm not doing MINOS because I need a self-explaining, dumped down GUI to
program. I'm doing it because I know that other people need that. You
can only reach the masses if you have some of Dogbert's cynicm.
Erik Naggum
| So I think there are a number of Lisp jobs out there. OTOH you probably
| have to be more flexible to take advantage of them (i.e. relocating,
| changing areas of interest, etc.), than for many other languages that are
| a tad more popular.
in my experience, which is somewhat limited, but that may actually serve
the point, certain areas of interest are best catered to by adding lots
of manpower to their solution, areas which will be "popular" in the most
obvious sense of the word, while other areas of interest will not attract
people in great spades regardless of the monetary rewards, such as those
that ask for significant dedication because of such things as very high
risks, skill requirements, entry costs, etc. if you choose one of those
areas of interest, no manager in his right mind places silly demands on
your programming language of choice and he will probably fire you if you
choose "popular" languages subject to vendors who care only about the
mass market and not about quality, unless his real plan is to fire you,
anyway, only to replace you by someone equally uncritical of his tools.
e.g., write some software to analyze the quality of the Y2K code that
really _stupid_ managers have invested in some 20 years too late and now
have lost control over to the point where the solution (fixing broken
code with new, largely untested code written by the kind of people who
think there's nothing wrong with ripping really stupid people off) opens
up for even more costly problems than the problem. if you can manage to
write software that can identify vulnerabilities in newly added code by
the turn of the century, such that people can use your tool to prepare
counter-attacks or invest in security measures or schedule time in the
court system when they know whom to sue for what and how much, you could
stand to make more money in the remaining 167 days than you could in the
whole of the next millennium.
solution: find areas of interest not invaded by populistic opportunists.
my suggestion is to avoid _any_ area where the solution space is covered
by existing code. on the other hand, generalizations where people make
do with "menial" systems because of too varying requirements may be a
good place to introduce intelligent programming languages. e.g., while
accounting and finance are pretty well known areas, you could figure out
a way to plan for budget reallocation according as political conditions
change (such as taxes) -- frightening amounts of human intelligence are
wasted on beating the idiots who change the rules all the time. such a
tool might also help the idiots in power "visualize" the likely effects
of their many proposals, which _might_ help us get less political idiocy
beta-tested using people's lives.
is it still "artificial intelligence" when the task is to model human
stupidity, or would only preventing its devastating consequences get an
"AI" rating?
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century
Erik Naggum
| I've tried CMUCL, clisp and ACL5. I find that they are all awkward at
| producing a "hello world" application.
of course they are. however, have you ever seen how much work it takes
to boot a modern Unix machine and run a C program just to have it print
"hello world" in an xterm running under MOTIF? man, it sucks. and it's
even more work if it tries to run NT. the machine should be doing a very
limited amount of work for this very simple task, but instead it spends
minutes booting and preparing itself to be useful, not to mention all the
crap necessary to get a program in C able to produce that output. yea,
verily, it sucks.
unfair comparison? not at all. why do you think they chose that phrase?
because they were developing Unix and the C compiler. it's appropriate
to make a machine print "hello world" to verify that everything works
after all the mind-boggling nonsense has interfered with the real purpose
of a computer, and you never know which part of booting up will fail due
to a minor bug. the delight in a C programmer's eyes when his machine
thus booted typed "hello world" back at him would probably parallel that
of a Common Lisp programmer when the satellite communications subsystem
he designed beams back "hello world" after an almost-aborted launch, a
navigation jet which misfired, and the solar panels sustained some damage
by space debris. normally, it's unnecessary to have confirmations of
basic operations, but it makes perfect sense under C.
there are other simple tasks that require a tremendous infrastructure to
make a trivial task come back with a positive result. e.g., you need DNS
to be set up right, routers and firewalls must to do their job, the local
network and telecommunications links must let stuff through, etc, before
you can type "ping elvis" and have the system type "elvis is alive" back
at you. this is actually so delighting that there is a disproportionate
number of machines called "elvis" for this particular reason. (I think
it would be much more fun to have machines called "thelma" and "louise".)
who, these days, would pick up a telephone and consider "hello" to be a
landmark event in human history? while there's nothing wrong with a
strong sense of fascination with "all that which just _works_ around us",
getting excited about "hello world" programs appears to me to be a sure
sign of insanity, or at least a fairly constant case of missing the boat.
| it's just that unix and windows are set up to support C and C++. e.g., C
| has a largish libc these days.
these two statements are pretty much contradictory. the problem is that
neither Unix nor Windows _actually_ support either C or C++, but they
manage to make them work, with downright incredible effort. if you look
inside the libraries and see how a system call actually works and how
much it differs from the C calling convention and usage, you'd be a fool
not to revise your opinion. and _does_ an operating system that forces
the programmer to check to see whether the operating system did what it
was asked to do every damn time you ask it to do anything actually give
any relevant form of support to anyone?
in my view, Unix and Windows support Common Lisp better than they support
C because C is designed for a 70's style machine and operating system,
which modern machines and operating systems have to mimic with all their
flaws and misdesigns, while Common Lisp is a modern language that is well
suited to be hosted on modern systems, and it just happens to be, too.
the irony here is that Common Lisp has been what these machines and
operating systems have aspired to support for all these years and now
that they have finally grown to the task, people have so many problems
with the software written while they were growing up that day-to-day
survival has obscured everything to the point where people who are too
young to know that computers were designed to help people think better,
not just do the same old menial labor faster, believe there is nothing
more to it than luring lots and lots of people to perform menial tasks by
mouse instead of by lever.
anyone remember how the fear that machines would take over the world
quieted down as Bill Gates started to peddle his limpware? the computers
sure did take over the world, but whoever is afraid of toothless little
poodles who all wag their tails when they expected monsters? imagine a
little icon that said "My Scary Monster" or "My Scary Neighborhood" and
a browser that said "abandon all hope ye who click here". wouldn't sell
much, would it? and that's why they are called "confidence games".
I remember someone saying that if it hadn't been for automatic switches
in the telephone network, the entire population of planet earth would
have had to be telephone operators to handle the load of telephone usage
in 1993 or thereabout. I get the eerie feeling that because modern
computer systems are so incredibly braindamaged in their design and in
the tools used to program them, the entire population of planet earth
will be programming these idiotic boxes pretty soon if managers don't
wise up to the fact that the equivalent of automatic switches already
exist and have done so for at least 20 years. yet if Y2K doesn't light
up most manager's view of the world of programming, there isn't hope for
mankind at all.
so, yeah, Lisp is dying because we all have to program in C++ to Bill
Gates' tune, so we don't have time to think about making a better world
with better languages and less menial nonsense in programming computers.
the same thing happened in the last revolution, but fears in those times
caused labor unions and a strong sentiment against all business in some
quarters. user unions these days can't even stop the U.S. Congress from
enacting more laws to protect the software companies from Y2K lawsuits.
but of course, Lisp isn't dying -- it's just that if you think in terms
of the imminent end of the world, _everything_ is soon food for the great
garbage collector in the sky and whoever is not scrambling in panic looks
like they aren't moving and have been passed by or are dying.
the problem I see is not that Bill Gates has shaped the world of useless
trinkets in software, but has also managed to spread his competitiveness
and his personal fear of losing to imaginary competitors to businesses
and homes everywhere, so now everybody is _afraid_ of losing some battle
which isn't happening, instead of getting about their own lives. like,
if you aren't using today's fad language in the very latest version of
the IDE, you'll be left behind. aaaugh! but it's good that some people
run like they are scared out of their wits. if they suddenly disappear
over the edge of a cliff, a good number of people will notice in time and
_not_ follow them. those are the ones that matter.
you can scare most people most of the time, but you can't scare all of
the people all of the time -- some will always use Common Lisp.
#:Erik, who'll stop cross-posting to comp.lang.misc now
Erik Naggum
| The reason C/C++, and before that Pascal, took off was because forward
| looking companies [I'm thinking of Borland in particular, but others were
| also involved] took chances and sold their systems at well below cost
| hoping to create their markets. It is true that these systems were
| typically stripped down relative to "professional" development systems
| available, but they introduced people to the language at affordable cost
| and built a base of programmers familiar with both the language in
| general and the company's products in particular.
the same has been done in the marketing and production of wines. those
who sell dirt cheap wine continue to thrive, and we see the same effect
as we do in programming languages: large masses of people get intoxicated
and dependent and contine to devour cheap wine, while a few people get
seriously interested in great wines and easily spend 100 times more money
on a bottle of a great wine than regular consumers do. yet, for some
bizarre reason, expensive wines make a respected market, nobody in their
right mind wants them to be free, and it is not considered a good thing
to turn people into alcoholics just to be able to sell more cheap wine.
| Curious newcomers who lack the ability to set up a shareware/freeware
| system may be willing to try a low cost commercial system which is easy
| to install and use. Commercial Lisp implementors, for the most part,
| either didn't offer low cost intro packages or didn't advertise that they
| did. Out of sight, out of mind.
right. the commercial Lisp vendors offer anyone who ask a reasonable
question a simple and easy way to try their software, completely for
free, and free or extremely low-cost systems somehow is not enough to
make people interested in serious Common Lisp implementations, in some
people's minds. so obviously your analogy doesn't hold at all.
I started with CMUCL myself, but found that Allegro CL offered so much
more that the work I would need to put into CMUCL would make it all but
impossible to do well-paid work in Common Lisp in CMUCL: after pretty
serious exposure to C++, I had come to conclude that I needed to get
myself into a position where I would never ever have to write any C++
again, so I set out on a path that removed me almost completely from the
mainstream, and if I were to recover the cost of that, only commercial
Lisps supported by someone other than myself could work for me. (I would
like a commercial Emacs, too, for exactly the same reasons. perhaps I'm
just getting old.)
I'd argue that what has kept Common Lisp from wide-spread success is its
free implementations -- not only are the implementations that students
normally see low quality as development environments go, all the crappy
Schemes out there that try really hard to call themselves "Lisp" destroy
the name recognition of Lisp completely (why can't they just stick to
calling their toys "Scheme"?), and any student who didn't question his
professors and peers would have to conclude that Lisp is a bad joke.
the reason C succeeded is that Unix succeeded, and Unix succeeded because
of the coolness factor among early 70's computer science students, and
that was a coolness factor unrelated to overall technical merits, but
very much related to _some_ brilliant ideas. DOS succeeded because it
was so broken that any 14-year-old idiot could fix it and brag about it
to his peers, causing kids everywhere to "get involved". C++ is riding
on the DOS wave that Windows rode in on, too -- most Microsoft victims
have _always_ used Microsoft products. Pascal succeded because it was
the language of choice on the Apple, which was also "cool", and Macintosh
fans don't wander off the narrow path, either. there was a market for
these languages completely unrelated to the languages themselves, but
these are consumer languages. winning is being stronger than your
competition, but as with any relation, becoming "stronger than" either
means you get stronger or you find a competition you are already stronger
than. Lisp is stronger than any competition in lots of places. it is
not stronger than languages optimized for dummies who, inexplicably,
believe that they can learn them in 21 days. it is, however, much
stronger than professional C/C++.
now, if you think C/C++ is cheap in the professional market, that using
professional class libraries is as easy as bragging to some manager that
you know C++, and that you can be unskilled in all C++ jobs, you are way
out of your mind. there is a professional market for C++ work that costs
much more than Common Lisp systems cost, but because this market does as
little advertising as Common Lisp does, you never see it, either. and
when you hear that a project has moved from Common Lisp to C++, it is
_not_ moved from Allegro CL to MSVC++ with MFC -- they move to a language
that most C++ programmers wouldn't even know how to begin to understand,
using stuff from the language that _actually_ supports large-scale work,
not the silly stuff that C++ is sold on at the consumer level. this
usage of C++ is much harder than doing the same kind of thing in Common
Lisp, as most managers find out as soon as they have made the stupid
decision to use C++, only they don't know how to undo their bad decision,
so they continue down the very expensive road, probably adding a lot of
manpower in the process. (the opportunity for most project managers to
learn from their mistakes is severely limited: they get fired and spend a
lot of time looking for new work. because of this, languages with large
"people bases" are preferred over what will more likely succeed, because
managers are people people and most of them are insufficiently technical
to assess risks even if they might be risk takers to begin with.)
Lisp's perception in the market has also been rocked by some spectacular
cases of bad company. when Lucid folded on its C++ project, its Common
Lisp had been a cash cow for a long time, and it continued to produce
money enough that it was worth salvaging -- I never heard more about the
C++ effort. of course, Lucid was best known for its Common Lisp, so
those who already didn't like Lisp got an easy opportunity to knock Lisp
again. when Harlequin was in danger of folding recently, it was wholly
unrelated to its Lisp business, which appears healthy but out of vogue
with venture capitalists and investors, but their problems has already
caused people to become scared about Lisp's future.
I think it works like this: if you're clearly better than the rest, you
get credit when you win, and you get blamed if you lose. ("if you are so
good, how come you don't make a lot of money?" is a typical instance of
this sorry situation, as if certain things are inevitably connected.) if
you are no better than the rest, you can take credit if you win, but you
don't get blamed if you lose. if you are worse than the rest, whoever
chooses you and wins did something spectacular, but if you fail, they
were just dumb who chose a loser. I think it works this way in many
aspects of life, and I think it does so because most people don't
actually _like_ winners unless they are certain they'll never be beaten
by them themselves. I think that's why watching sports is so popular,
too. in my view, fad languages that get all the attention are just like
the sports dudes who are very much _temporary_ winners in their fields,
earning a lot of money so they can retire to oblivion after a few years
of fame. the only way you can actually _win_ is to stay completely away
from the mass audiences and above all not depend on popular votes for
popularity, not beat the crap out of anyone in a competition (because
those that happened to will be certain to try to beat the crap out of
you, too), and not even get into fields where the short-term profits are
enormous, because that only means a lot of people lose a lot of money and
want to recover it, trying again and again.
I'm not sure I'm helping, but I'm willing to say that a project I have
worked on succeeded because of Common Lisp, mostly because I'm sure it
won't fail for any other reason. I'd be damned cautious to mention a
Common Lisp project that succeeded technically, but was in danger of
failing for any other reason, however, simply because there are so many
stupid people out there who wouldn't know what this meant.
what makes a success is not, has never been, and will never be that the
entry to it is free. what makes it a success is that people stick with
it. if you can't make people stick with something unless they get the
first dose for free, I'd say you have something that people really
shouldn't stick with at all. I think people start using stuff because
they hear about it, and it really doesn't matter to a lot of people that
it may cost money. after all, most people pay for their cars and won't
give them up no matter what environmentalists and politicians do to stop
them, and don't tell me it's because they got free rides as kids. in my
view, access to source code is only a question of education -- it can
never be a question of market penetration. Linux did _not_ win because
it is free, but because people wanted an alternative to Microsoft on the
dirt-cheap computers they could get their hands on. and if you look at
all the incredibly crappy software that people actually pay good money
for, being free is _obviously_ not necessary for success. nor is being
free sufficient, since lots of free software fails, too.
so why the clamoring about stuff being free? and why do I keep hearing
"you have a duty to provide me with the tools I need to make a living"
from so many of the free software proponents? this can only mean that
there are way more people who _believe_ they will never ever write any
software that others will want to use, and I'm sure they're right,
because anyone who argues that others should give him everything must of
necessity be open to similar requests to himself. Free Software has
_never_ been about any duty to provide anyone with anything at no cost.
it's all about making it possible to learn from the experiences of others
-- it's an education thing, not some anti-commercial crap. I, too, want
programmers to be able to share in the experiences of the entire trade,
much as medical doctors are expected to share their findings and their
methods, but I can't for the life of me understand why that means you
want the right to _refuse_ to pay for software. something got seriously
wacked in the communication.
#:Erik