LW "hobbyist pricing"
verec
Harvey) said:
>> There should be "hobbyist" licenses for LispWorks and Allegro. I'd love
>> to shell out the $1K+ price, but with matenance fees and no real income
>> being produced from it, I have a hard time convincing myself to do so.
>> Even 1/2 the price (or no upgrade fees) would make it worthwhile.
>> *cough* (hint) *cough*
>
> What do you want that, say, LispWorks Personal Edition doesn't offer?
> Executable generation? Unrestricted memory heap size?
Since we're hobyyist, we don't need CORBA or binary delivery (they
are indeed useful, but as a "hobbyist" I can live without), and
I'm not interested _at all_ in either SQL or Prolog.
What I'd be happy with, if the "hobbyist edition price" was right:
what the Persobal Edition currently is but:
1. actually read the .ini file
2. no artificial "Quit after 5 hours"
I've been delaying the purchase for weeks, for exactly the
same reasons as Jeff. My "pay-the-bills" job is in Java, and
I don't see it switching to Lisp in the immediate future.
I also understand that LW cannot afford to canibalise their
sales of the professional edition, but my guess is that leaving
out the application delivery from the hobbyist edition is what
would draw people who need it to the professional edition.
FWIW, I'd see it that way:
Personal Edition USD 0
Hobbyist USD 300 (reads .ini file)
Web-deploy basic USD 600 (doesn't quit after 5 hours)
Professional Web USD 900 (does SQL + binary delivery)
Enterprise USD 1200 (Prolog bits+ "knowlege base")
or, assuming the actual product is built by just swicthing
compiler options at build time, and that all the features
are independant, they could have:
Base Pizza: USD 0 (= current Personal Edition)
Topping: USD 200 per item
Chose any mix of topping among:
- reads ini file
- works 24/24
- binary delivery
- SQL
- Corba/ORB
- Prolog
- Knowledge base
Just my 2p :)
--
JFB
Kenny Tilton
> On 2006-01-10 12:18:07 +0000, usenet-...@abbrvtd.org.uk (Duncan
> Harvey) said:
>
>>> There should be "hobbyist" licenses for LispWorks and Allegro. I'd love
>>> to shell out the $1K+ price, but with matenance fees and no real income
>>> being produced from it, I have a hard time convincing myself to do so.
>>> Even 1/2 the price (or no upgrade fees) would make it worthwhile.
>>> *cough* (hint) *cough*
>>
>>
>> What do you want that, say, LispWorks Personal Edition doesn't offer?
>> Executable generation? Unrestricted memory heap size?
>
>
> Since we're hobyyist, we don't need CORBA or binary delivery (they
> are indeed useful, but as a "hobbyist" I can live without), and
> I'm not interested _at all_ in either SQL or Prolog.
>
> What I'd be happy with, if the "hobbyist edition price" was right:
>
> what the Persobal Edition currently is but:
>
> 1. actually read the .ini file
> 2. no artificial "Quit after 5 hours"
>
> I've been delaying the purchase for weeks, for exactly the
> same reasons as Jeff. My "pay-the-bills" job is in Java, and
> I don't see it switching to Lisp in the immediate future.
That might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
kt
verec
>> I don't see it switching to Lisp in the immediate future.
> That might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let's hope you're wrong :-)
--
JFB
Cameron MacKinnon
> FWIW, I'd see it that way:
> Personal Edition USD 0
...etc...
> or...
>
> Base Pizza: USD 0 (= current Personal Edition)
> Topping: USD 200 per item
What *is* it worth (your advice that is... not LispWorks)? Do you have
any sort of business, finnce or economics background?
I think if you're going to come up with a radically revised pricing
grid, you should work it through and show us estimated unit sales and
revenues from their current model, and projected unit sales and revenues
under your plan. That way we can judge whether the assumptions that
underlie your strategy are reasonable.
Short of that, I suspect you're just another person who thinks that the
world would (temporarily) be a better place if everybody at LispWorks
took a pay cut.
verec
<cmack...@clearspot.net> said:
> Short of that, I suspect you're just another person who thinks that the
> world would (temporarily) be a better place if everybody at LispWorks
> took a pay cut.
Precisely not!
I'm just suggesting that the *economics* might work to their
advantage if they were charging more people for less money
than fewer people for more.
From my vantage point, Lisp is following a surge thes days.
It may only turn out to be a spike, and then it may not.
I was just expressing the voice of a lambda user of the
Personal Edition, who would want to shell out _some_ bucks
but not the whole Monthy, for features that matter to me.
If they, or you, can't listen to *users* what are you doing
in business ???
--
JFB
Wade Humeniuk
>
> Just my 2p :)
Are you sure its the price making you nervous? Or maybe that it is
Lisp? Some of the best things in my life began as "bad" ideas.
Sometimes you just have to jump, then its obvious what has to be
done next. Also, if anything, consider your purchase of LW Pro to be
an acknowledgment of the work that LispWorks, Franz and the long
line of Lispers have put into helping you out.
Keep it simple.
Wade
Herb Martin
news:geVwf.70423$m05.39497@clgrps12...
I don't know about the previous poster (or specifically about the
current version of LispWorks) but even the FREE version of that
other well known Lisp is too expensive (time and effort to download
it) since it just QUITS.
My past experience with all of the free version of Lisp commercial
software always ends up here: the demo versions are so awful
as to make buying even the $100 personal version a poor bet.
Just last night, that 'other Lisp' quit merely because I fed it a bad
path (through a mistaken mouse-click AND no confirmation) when
choosing a "project path."
Software that stops in 5 hours is of no interest to me (lack of exe etc
is a more reasonable practice) as I frequently start programs and
leave them running for weeks, coming back to them between other
tasks.
Ultimately, only the vendor can decide what is correct for their
product (I certainly do that for my own products) but a lot can
be learned from the way a vendor responds to criticisms and
suggestions...even when saying "No, we are going to do that"
there are ways to make it clear WHY that decision is being
taken without making it sound like the one offering the suggestion
has no right to such an opinion.
Things like 'Prove it is in our interest and we will consider it',
do NOT bode well for future communication when you plan
to spend a chunk of money for a product.
--
Herb Martin
Cameron MacKinnon
> Software that stops in 5 hours is of no interest to me (lack of exe etc
> is a more reasonable practice) as I frequently start programs and
> leave them running for weeks, coming back to them between other
> tasks.
And providing free software to impecunious whiners is likely of no
interest to software vendors, merely an unfortunate side effect.
> Ultimately, only the vendor can decide what is correct for their
> product (I certainly do that for my own products) but a lot can
> be learned from the way a vendor responds to criticisms and
> suggestions...even when saying "No, we are going to do that"
> there are ways to make it clear WHY that decision is being
> taken without making it sound like the one offering the suggestion
> has no right to such an opinion.
The twin of "everyone is entitled to an opinion" is "...and some
opinions are worth more than others." I certainly didn't say that the OP
didn't have a right to an opinion, but I did ask him how much his
opinion was worth, and indicated that I'd accept either an appeal to
authority ("I've got a degree from the LSE") or some numbers showing
that his opinion was the result of a bit of methodical thought on the
subject. In response, the pseudonymous OP merely restated its thesis,
with no added information whatsoever.
Any fool can say "if you lower your prices, you might make up the loss
through volume." I wonder, do such people also inflict this pearl of
wisdom on their butchers, their bakers and their candlestick makers? Do
they post in luxury automobile forums that, but for the prices being
$20,000 too high, they too would drive Brand X? If not, what is unique
about software that makes people feel qualified to offer such 'advice'?
Who is more likely to have the optimal pricing strategy, an
unsuccessful[1] person who won't even put his name to his opinion, or a
company that has survived in a difficult marketplace for quite some
time? What company is more likely to have found an optimal price: One
that has a dedicated following of people who love the product but can't
afford it, or one where every pauper who finds the product at all useful
thinks it affordable?
> Things like 'Prove it is in our interest and we will consider it',
> do NOT bode well for future communication when you plan
> to spend a chunk of money for a product.
One thing to consider is that companies which lower their prices to
attract customers at the margin get... marginal customers. These new
costomers are people who weren't convinced of the value proposition
before (they see the software as being less valuable than the vendor's
earlier customers). Or they are just plain poor; they'd have bought
before but didn't have the money. Because it costs what feels like a lot
of money TO THEM, they're likely to feel entitled to a lot of service,
notwithstanding that they didn't spend what the vendor considers a lot
of money. And the people who haven't spent a penny on the product, but
post in public complaining about the demo's limitations and the pricing
structure? Oh, I'd be bending over backwards to please THEM if I was a
vendor -- who DOESN'T want to convert fractious malcontents they've
never done business with into malcontented customers?
[1] Not to put too fine a point upon it, but all we really know about
the poster is that he can't afford the product. I've been reading a lot
about Bayesian inference lately...
a@b.c
<cmack...@clearspot.net> wrote:
>Who is more likely to have the optimal pricing strategy, an
>unsuccessful[1] person who won't even put his name to his opinion, or a
His opinion is widely shared. It's based on common sense. Just
because he doesn't like the price doesn't mean he's unsuccessful. The
prices of ACL and LW are high enough to be a problem for 99+% of all
the people who ever lived, but most of those people could be
considered successful.
>company that has survived in a difficult marketplace for quite some
But their pricing strategies could be a big part of the reason why
that marketplace is difficult.
>time? What company is more likely to have found an optimal price: One
>that has a dedicated following of people who love the product but can't
>afford it, or one where every pauper who finds the product at all useful
>thinks it affordable?
Anyone who finds Lisp useful should not be considered a pauper.
The pricing strategies of the major commercial Lisp vendors are left
over from a time when the software market expected such high prices.
The number of computer users in the world was a tiny fraction of what
it is now. But such pricing strategies became obsolete in the 1980's,
when companies such as Borland made some programming languages popular
by pricing their products, such as Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, etc., at $99
per copy, and started selling them to the mass market.
That might be the single biggest reason why C is more popular than
Lisp today. A generation failed to learn Lisp, because they weren't
motivated by its lack of popularity. If they had learned it, it could
easily be the most widely used programming language in the world
today. From the points of view of today's lispers, most of those
users might seem like idiots, and you might think you're better off
without them, but just think how easy it would be for all lispers to
get Lisp jobs. Most programming jobs, you're working for idiots
anyway, but it would be far better to be doing that work in Lisp. And
there would be more Lisp vendors competing with each other, which is
the main driving force of innovation.
A lot of lispers seem to think the two main Lisp vendors did a lot of
sophisticated market research etc. and came up with the optimal
pricing strategies. But when did they do that research? When was the
last time their pricing strategies changed? Was it when the number of
computers in the world was a very tiny fraction of what it is now? If
you use your common sense you can see that it's not necessarily true
that they still know what they're doing. They may just keep improving
their products and continuing to sell them the same way they have all
those years. Because, maybe, that's all they know how to do.
justinhj
They charge what people will pay, and whatever their business model
dictates. It's their business model not yours... you're entitled to
complain about it and not buy, they're entitled to run their business
how they like.
Justin
verec
<whumeniu+...@telus.net> said:
There's a lot of wisdom in what you just said. But, sometimes
the economic matters get in the way :-(
Consider this: I pay my bills by using tools I got for free:
JDK+Eclipse. When I was in C++ land, I *paid* for every
single release of the C+= compiler (CodeWarrior) I was using
then. (About USD 500/year)
I'm using Lisp as hobbyist, which means that I cannot (yet?)
support myself with it. Yet, acknowledging the fact that
producing software does cost money (after all: if it didn't,
I wouldn't get paid!) I'm keen in paying a certain amount
for LispWorks, even though I'm only using it as a hobby, and
even though I *bought* MCL 4.3 a few years back.
Now, USD/EUR 1100 for a hobbyist tool is quite beyond what
I am comfortable with.
--
JFB
Pascal Costanza
> Now, USD/EUR 1100 for a hobbyist tool is quite beyond what
> I am comfortable with.
There are both cheaper and more expensive hobbies.
Pascal
--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Closer to MOP & ContextL:
http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
verec
<cmack...@clearspot.net> said:
> Herb Martin wrote:
>> Software that stops in 5 hours is of no interest to me (lack of exe etc
>> is a more reasonable practice) as I frequently start programs and
>> leave them running for weeks, coming back to them between other
>> tasks.
>
> And providing free software to impecunious whiners is likely of no
> interest to software vendors, merely an unfortunate side effect.
That's the most rubbish non sequitur I have read in *years*.
Dear Mr Know-it-all, since you didn't know better, I'm going
to provide you with a scoop! LispWorks does CURRENTLY offer
a free (as in no money involved) version of their Lisp
environment known as "Personal Edition".
What this *whole* thread is about, is how to rebalance things
so that LispWorks could get some MORE money, while at the same
time offering incentives for people like me to upgrade from
the free edition to a paying one.
Got that?
--
JFB
verec
> verec wrote:
>
>> Now, USD/EUR 1100 for a hobbyist tool is quite beyond what
>> I am comfortable with.
>
> There are both cheaper and more expensive hobbies.
Fair point.
But let's put things in perspective. Why do I, in Java land,
use the free Eclipse rather than the non-free IntelliJ IDEA?
Why did I use, in C++ land, the non-free CodeWarrior, rather
than the free GCC?
Because that's more a question of productivity than an a
question of price ... up until a certain point.
Why did NeXT fail as NeXT? Among many other possible reasons,
one was the developer tools pricing: I know because I applied.
At USD 6,000 a pop, there was no way I could start exploring,
*first*, and then possibly turn into a commercial endehavour
next.
Fortunately, LispWorks allows me to explore for free.
Unfortunately, as I feel I need to reach to the next level,
pricing is an issue. Which it would certainly not be if
I had a Lisp business, but I don't. Not yet.
My credit card is my hand. Here's USD 400 for the PE feature
set + ini files + doesn't quit after 5 hours. Nothing more.
No SQL/Corba/Prolog. LispWorks, are you listening?
--
JFB
Michael
> And providing free software to impecunious whiners is likely of no
> interest to software vendors, merely an unfortunate side effect.
Is there a reason you are being so hostile on this topic Cameron?
> The twin of "everyone is entitled to an opinion" is "...and some
> opinions are worth more than others." I certainly didn't say that the OP
> didn't have a right to an opinion, but I did ask him how much his
> opinion was worth, and indicated that I'd accept either an appeal to
> authority ("I've got a degree from the LSE") or some numbers showing
> that his opinion was the result of a bit of methodical thought on the
> subject. In response, the pseudonymous OP merely restated its thesis,
> with no added information whatsoever.
Thesis? He just stated his opinion that LispWorks cost too much for a
someone who is never going to make any money with it -- i.e. a hobbyist.
He is not alone in that opinion. Perhaps you should just chill out.
> Any fool can say "if you lower your prices, you might make up the loss
> through volume." I wonder, do such people also inflict this pearl of
> wisdom on their butchers, their bakers and their candlestick makers? Do
> they post in luxury automobile forums that, but for the prices being
> $20,000 too high, they too would drive Brand X? If not, what is unique
> about software that makes people feel qualified to offer such 'advice'?
Because the LispWorks people presumably read this group while I seriously
doubt my automaker reads USENET :)
> Who is more likely to have the optimal pricing strategy, an
> unsuccessful[1] person who won't even put his name to his opinion, or a
> company that has survived in a difficult marketplace for quite some
> time? What company is more likely to have found an optimal price: One
> that has a dedicated following of people who love the product but can't
> afford it, or one where every pauper who finds the product at all useful
> thinks it affordable?
Why are you being so hostile and rude? The guy just stated his
opinion. You can disagree without being an ass about it.
> One thing to consider is that companies which lower their prices to
> attract customers at the margin get... marginal customers. These new
> costomers are people who weren't convinced of the value proposition
> before (they see the software as being less valuable than the vendor's
> earlier customers). Or they are just plain poor; they'd have bought
> before but didn't have the money.
I can't speak for the original poster, but as for myself, I have a
non-lisp related job, a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. I can't afford
$1000 for a commercial lisp. I could see spending $200 or $300 for one
that had basic features like reading an initialization file and not
quitting after 5 hours.
You not sharing our situation doesn't change ours or invalidate our opinion.
> [1] Not to put too fine a point upon it, but all we really know about
> the poster is that he can't afford the product. I've been reading a lot
> about Bayesian inference lately...
I can't afford it either. I guess that makes me a bad person too then.
Michael Price
Pascal Costanza
> My credit card is my hand. Here's USD 400 for the PE feature
> set + ini files + doesn't quit after 5 hours. Nothing more.
> No SQL/Corba/Prolog. LispWorks, are you listening?
I think you will probably have more success if you contact them
directly, especially because they stated that they consider changing
their licensing schemes for LispWorks 5.0.
Wade Humeniuk
> On 2006-01-10 20:58:52 +0000, Wade Humeniuk
> <whumeniu+...@telus.net> said:
>
>> verec wrote:
>>
>>> Just my 2p :)
>>
>>
>> Are you sure its the price making you nervous? Or maybe that it is
>> Lisp? Some of the best things in my life began as "bad" ideas.
>> Sometimes you just have to jump, then its obvious what has to be
>> done next. Also, if anything, consider your purchase of LW Pro to be
>> an acknowledgment of the work that LispWorks, Franz and the long
>> line of Lispers have put into helping you out.
>
>
> There's a lot of wisdom in what you just said. But, sometimes
> the economic matters get in the way :-(
>
> Consider this: I pay my bills by using tools I got for free:
> JDK+Eclipse. When I was in C++ land, I *paid* for every
> single release of the C+= compiler (CodeWarrior) I was using
> then. (About USD 500/year)
>
Can I assume that you, like many other programmers, are extremely tired
of the crap out there and do not want to pay for yet another shitty
programming language (YASPL)? I think there comes a point when a
programmer realizes that programming sucks and no amount of tools
and marketing hipe can change reality. There is something to be said
your young idealism, reft of reality. That is why I said that sometimes
the best things are really began as seemingly "bad" ideas and just
jumping of the cliff.
Did CodeWarrior turn you off this of paying sizeable chunks
of money for programming tools?
On the economic matters I have to agree very few people seem willing
to pay anything for things of value, especially when it comes to
programming. The trend seems to be having developer tools available for
free (the only exception seeming to be the MS Visual Studio Set of tools).
As for LispWorks pricing model, I really do not know if something
like you suggest would work. Nor do I know how they could protect
themselves from people abusing a different trial version. I would
suggest that you use one of the free Common Lisps. At least CL is
standardized and when and if the time comes to buy LW then the
transition should be fairly easy.
The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into developing
it in something else. The question is not whether it can be developed
in Lisp, its the security that companies (who can pay for the development)
require. This problem is sapping the energy out of me and I am
considering dropping out of software development altogether.
Wade
Steven E. Harris
> The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
> if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
> someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into
> developing it in something else. The question is not whether it can
> be developed in Lisp, its the security that companies (who can pay
> for the development) require. This problem is sapping the energy
> out of me and I am considering dropping out of software development
> altogether.
I can relate, having experienced this situation and resulting quandary
in the recent past. Perhaps this is the beginning of a "Road from
Lisp" (RfL) story survey. Kenny would not be pleased.
--
Steven E. Harris
Herb Martin
>> is a more reasonable practice) as I frequently start programs and
>> leave them running for weeks, coming back to them between other
>> tasks.
>
> And providing free software to impecunious whiners is likely of no
> interest to software vendors, merely an unfortunate side effect.
>
Obviously providing it so SOMEONE is of interest since
some people do it -- the question is why would anyone
ever put out a crappy demo that just crashes.
If you consider that saying a piece of software "crashes"
(when it crashes cold) is whining then you have a pretty
pitiful command of the English language.
Your attitude (shared curiously by a small number of people on
this newsgroup) that their is "nothing wrong" is likely one of
the reasons for Lisps (also) curious lack of popularity.
Why do you and others answer legitimate issues with "everything
is fine", head-in-the-sand responses?
It's a little bit insane, neurotic really.
--
Herb Martin
Cameron MacKinnon
> LispWorks does CURRENTLY offer
> a free (as in no money involved) version of their Lisp
> environment known as "Personal Edition".
And still, it's not enough for some. They use Personal Edition (or
don't), and complain about its limitations. Their thanks to the company
which graciously provides such a tool is to demand more and to criticize
its management in public.
> What this *whole* thread is about, is how to rebalance things
> so that LispWorks could get some MORE money, while at the same
> time offering incentives for people like me to upgrade from
> the free edition to a paying one.
Yes, you've been understood. And I've asked for any supporting evidence
(or even measured supposition) you had to show that your price scheme
might be more profitable than the current one. None was forthcoming.
Instead you just keep repeating your thesis over and over.
So here's the scorecard:
Several executives at LispWorks, setting prices based on x number of
years experience in the market, supplemented by constant contact with
their customers and prospective customers. They're risking their jobs,
their careers, and a goodly sum of shareholders' money on being right.
- versus -
Some anonymous, skint, know-nothing member of the booboisie who just
happens to have a conflict of interest (but of course sees it as a
"win-win situation") and who can't even advance his argument past the
stage of "Thag want pay less. Thag have friends."
With nothing else to go on, my money would be on the professionals.
You seem to think that you represent a desirable customer, one who has
heretofore been priced out of the market (but only by a factor of four,
and what's 75% among friends?). I see you as more like someone who walks
into a delicatessen, avails himself to the free samples, then starts
loudly berating the shopkeeper, saying he can't afford the Havarti at
those prices but would be more than happy to buy some at 75% off. He
turns to the other customers and asks them if they wouldn't also buy
more Havarti at 75% off. The proper response to a 'customer' such as
this is to get him off the premises speedily, using the water hose if
necessary, the quicker to serve the true customers.
It's funny, but I can't recall a single poster who's pondered the
economics of the Lisp vendor market (and there have been many such
posters) who concluded that prices should be raised, or who concluded
that prices should be lowered AND OFFERED TO STAKE HIS CAPITAL ON IT, or
who wasn't loudly declaring himself first in line to benefit under the
new pricing scheme.
Pascal Bourguignon
LispWorks is a commercial entity, they play the market game.
If you're not happy with a feature of their software, you just don't
buy it and everybody's happy:
- you don't get to use crap software,
- when they don't sell as many copies as they hoped, they get the
- signal that their software is not good enough or is too expensive,
- so they can improve it or lower their price.
It's not "everything is fine", is what mechanisms are in place to
improve things.
The mechanism to improve commercial software is not to buy it. (*)
The mechanism to improve freedom software is to do it your self (or
contract someone to do it for you).
(*) otherwise, why do you think the most sold OS is the crapiest?
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
"Specifications are for the weak and timid!"
Pascal Costanza
You're somewhat harsh in your wording. But you're right that making a
product doesn't necessarily sell more. There is actually a danger that
the current customers will downgrade to a "lesser" version, so a change
in licensing could actually be a disadvantage for a company.
A typical misunderstanding is that the more complete versions offer more
than the less complete or even free versions. To a certain extent,
that's correct when seen purely from the user's perception. (You get
less or more features.) From the vendor's perspective it's actually
quite different: They foremostly develop the complete version of their
product, the less complete versions require more work because of the
required configuration overhead which increases their cost, and the
lower price is "just" a rebate. The lesser product was actually more
expensive to produce than the full version!
A new pricing scheme has to take these forces into account.
Pascal Costanza
> But you're right that making a product doesn't necessarily sell more.
But you're right that making a product cheaper doesn't necessarily sell
more.
verec
<whumeniu+...@telus.net> said:
>> Consider this: I pay my bills by using tools I got for free:
>> JDK+Eclipse. When I was in C++ land, I *paid* for every
>> single release of the C+= compiler (CodeWarrior) I was using
>> then. (About USD 500/year)
> Can I assume that you, like many other programmers, are extremely tired
> of the crap out there and do not want to pay for yet another shitty
> programming language (YASPL)?
Yes, that is true in general, but not in the particular case
of LispWorks Personal Edition. It is not perfect, far from it
(Un Mac like on OSX, but more so than MCL, no refactoring tool,
no powerful search (but where, on my *file system* do I have
Lisp files calling "foo" or being called by "foo"?), though for
my productivity, it beats the free OpenMCL hands down. That's
why I'd rather encourage LispWorks to carry on, with a little
financial support :-)
> I think there comes a point when a programmer realizes that programming
> sucks and no amount of tools and marketing hipe can change reality.
That's what I love about Lisp-the-language: it squarely puts me
in front of a mirror, where every single short-coming is a failure
of mine to think properly, and hate about lisp-the-ide: where any
inconvenience thrown into my chain-of-thought just destroys the
flow.
> There is something to be said your young idealism,
44 and counting :-(
> reft of reality. That is why I said that sometimes the best things are
> really began as seemingly "bad" ideas and just jumping of the cliff.
>
> Did CodeWarrior turn you off this of paying sizeable chunks
> of money for programming tools?
No! They turned themselves down! Now, if I want to perform any
kind of serious C/C++/Objective C development I have no choice
but rely on the free GCC and the free Xcode, both of which I'd
rather pay some money to get their usability up the scale!
> On the economic matters I have to agree very few people seem willing
> to pay anything for things of value, especially when it comes to
> programming. The trend seems to be having developer tools available for
> free (the only exception seeming to be the MS Visual Studio Set of tools).
This one is more difficult. I guess that Eclipse is THE perfect
counter example to the rule that free software usability sucks.
But it is only this: the counter example, which means that the
rule generally holds.
> As for LispWorks pricing model, I really do not know if something
> like you suggest would work. Nor do I know how they could protect
> themselves from people abusing a different trial version. I would
> suggest that you use one of the free Common Lisps.
LispWorks Personal Edition *is* free (as in money). It's just that
I am inclined to pay a *reasonable* amount of money for *some* of
the features of the next edition (when you think of it: I'd pay
to have the *anti-features* removed :-)
> At least CL is standardized and when and if the time comes to buy LW
> then the transition should be fairly easy.
That's true and I count on it if I ever have to "deploy", but let's
not put the cart before the horse :)
> The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
> if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
> someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into developing
> it in something else. The question is not whether it can be developed
> in Lisp, its the security that companies (who can pay for the development)
> require.
I cam enpathise with what you say, and would agree that Lisp in
the enterprise is a non starter (in most cases) for the same reason
that Python/Ruby etc... are non starters either.
> This problem is sapping the energy out of me and I am
> considering dropping out of software development altogether.
Well, call me "brain-washed-by-Paul-Graham" if you wish, but even
though I'm not exactly in my teens :(, I plan to start "something",
Lisp being part of the equation, while, until that thing flies on
its two (or more :-) wings, I'll keep paying the bills with Java
for banks.
The only thing I always force myself to remember is that no amount
of failure is going to prevent me from trying again :)
--
JFB
verec
<cmack...@clearspot.net> said:
> And I've asked for any supporting evidence (or even measured
> supposition) you had to show that your price scheme might be more
> profitable than the current one. None was forthcoming. Instead you just
> keep repeating your thesis over and over.
I hate it when I am dense, but apparently, I am not alone.
In case this enterely escaped you, the post ended with "my 2p )"
and contain a Pizza analogy that should have made clear the
"tongue-in-cheek" nature of the post.
Though I stand by the ideas that:
- I may have got the details wrong (item pricing) but the general
idea seems sound to me
-:offer what people want, don't force feed them (and make them
pay for) things they don't want
As I have said, I am a USER. I am NOT in the business of
selling Lisp tools. I am in the business of POSSIBLY buying
Lisp tools.
I am NOT in the business of dictating LispWorks their pricing
strategy.
I AM in the business of telling them what I am PREPARED to
pay, and for WHICH FEATURES.
Is that too hard to grok ???
--
JFB
justinhj
The car dealer down the road lets me drive a mercedes round the block
to test it. But that's no good, I need it to go to work in it and do
the grocery shopping etc, but it's too expensive. How is a family man
who pays rent supposed to afford a mercedes?
So what do I do? I buy a car I can afford? Or should the mercedes
dealer look at his pricing model. I'm sure he would sell a lot more
them if they were about 4 times cheaper.
;-)
verec
> LispWorks is a commercial entity, they play the market game.
>
> If you're not happy with a feature of their software, you just don't
> buy it and everybody's happy:
That old chesnut of the "excluded-middle". No Pascal, this isn't
an "either-or" proposition.
This is not "fight them or join them".
This is about discussion and *** COLLABORATION ***.
If I can condense a bit my position, it is to say:
"Hey, LispWorks, I have needs such-and-such and I'm prepared
to pay so-and-so. How could we work that out?"
It's just that I know that I stand absolutely NO chance
of being heard if I start this conversation alone with
them.
On the other hand, if more than one people other than me
echoes what I'm saying here, the end result would be
a win-win for everybocy!
--
JFB
Paul Wallich
The pricing scheme also has to take probable support costs into account.
For $0 you're going to assume that the most you get is to ask a
clarifying question after having exhausted the manual and all the online
resources, or maybe report a clear bug (because in a sense that's as
much a benefit to the company as it is a cost). For $200 or $400 people
might expect a fair amount of handholding on installation, the odd
feature request or three...
paul
verec
> The car dealer down the road lets me drive a mercedes round the block
> to test it. But that's no good, I need it to go to work in it and do
> the grocery shopping etc, but it's too expensive. How is a family man
> who pays rent supposed to afford a mercedes?
>
> So what do I do? I buy a car I can afford? Or should the mercedes
> dealer look at his pricing model. I'm sure he would sell a lot more
> them if they were about 4 times cheaper.
Are you positively certain that the car analogy applies?
Software has development costs. Cars do.
Software has no build cost. Cars do.
Software has no duplication costs. Cars do
Software has no distribution costs. Cars do.
and on, and on...
--
JFB
verec
> The pricing scheme also has to take probable support costs into
> account. For $0 you're going to assume that the most you get is to
> ask a clarifying question after having exhausted the manual and all the
> online resources, or maybe report a clear bug (because in a sense
> that's as much a benefit to the company as it is a cost). For $200 or
> $400 people might expect a fair amount of handholding on installation,
> the odd feature request or three...
That's entirely true. But that's for them to handle. I have no say
in whether their development team is 200 underpaid engineers in India,
or 4 most talented hackers in the UK. I'm sure they could work out
a "support structure" that makes business sense for them, on their
own, without my input.
Besides this, there are many examples of successful companies
with all the gamut from insufferable, to so-so, to outstanding
support. Their choice.
Let's mot make this thread into a "Hey LispWorks, let us tell you
hoe to run your business"!, but rather, express what we want,
and what we would be *reasonably* willing to pay for it.
How to implement this, or not, is their own business.
--
JFB
justinhj
No it's not a perfect analogy but I was having fun writing it. ;)
Cameron MacKinnon
> I can't speak for the original poster, but as for myself, I have a
> non-lisp related job, a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. I can't afford
> $1000 for a commercial lisp. I could see spending $200 or $300 for one
> that had basic features like reading an initialization file and not
> quitting after 5 hours.
>
> You not sharing our situation doesn't change ours or invalidate our opinion.
What the heck do you know about my situation?
If your opinion was limited to "I'm priced out of the Lisp market, but
I'd be willing to pay $300" that would be one thing. But there's myriad
free Lisps and Schemes available, and computers powerful enough to run
them are given away free or put out to the curb on garbage day, thus
nobody in the first world can claim that they're priced out of the Lisp
market (and I'll note that the poser who started this thread is posting
from a Mac).
The opinions I object to (short of some supporting arguments) are the
ones that attack particular companies' pricing models in public. People
who express such opinions should be prepared to show their work,
especially if they plan or hope to gain personally from their proposed
new pricing model.
Frankly, I see a lowball, public counteroffer to a posted price as being
very rude indeed, and not merely one of a spectrum of valid opinions. I
don't think I'm alone in this, either: Try stopping by your local new
car dealer, and offer him 25% of the sticker price of one of his
vehicles. I doubt you'll get invited inside for further negotiations,
and you might be rudely surprised at the response you get.
Geoffrey Summerhayes
"verec" <ve...@mac.com> wrote in message
news:43c54e0d$0$87295$5a6a...@news.aaisp.net.uk...
Actually Lisp is closer to the factory that makes the cars.
But car companies don't generally include a copy of the
factory with the car in case there needs to be design changes,
Lisp programmers tend to include Lisp, it makes it easier to
upgrade via patches instead of sending a whole new car.
----
Geoff
verec
<cmack...@clearspot.net> said:
> Michael wrote:
>> I can't speak for the original poster, but as for myself, I have a
>> non-lisp related job, a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. I can't afford
>> $1000 for a commercial lisp. I could see spending $200 or $300 for one
>> that had basic features like reading an initialization file and not
>> quitting after 5 hours.
>>
>> You not sharing our situation doesn't change ours or invalidate our opinion.
>
> What the heck do you know about my situation?
Your are not dense. You are opaque. Even light can't go through!
Who cares about *your own little situtation* ? Apart from you,
that is, as your flooding this thread proves.
> If your opinion was limited to "I'm priced out of the Lisp market, but
> I'd be willing to pay $300" that would be one thing.
Please, show us an example of anyone saying otherwise.
> But there's myriad free Lisps and Schemes available, and computers
> powerful enough to run them are given away free or put out to the curb
> on garbage day, thus nobody in the first world can claim that they're
> priced out of the Lisp market
Quit putting words into people's mouth! No one said they "we're priced
out of the lisp market".
You fail repeatedly to understand the difference between things
people want and not-for-money available software.
> (and I'll note that the poser who started this thread is posting from a Mac).
And so?
Yes. I did fork the bucks to pay for a PowerBook, because my
entire *professional life* depends on it. Your mileage may vary.
> The opinions I object to (short of some supporting arguments) are the
> ones that attack particular companies' pricing models in public.
But WHO is ATTACKING companies???
Quit smoking the carpet, that's no good, either for you (as if I did
care...) nor for this thread.
Put your glasses on. Re-read the initial post. And come back with
a SINGLE attack you can find there. I'm waiting ...
> People who express such opinions should be prepared to show their work,
> especially if they plan or hope to gain personally from their proposed
> new pricing model.
I have shown that I am a USER who CARES ENOUGH about THEIR
product, that I am OFFERING money in exchange of them
turning TWO SWITCHES OFF in their build process.
> Frankly, I see a lowball, public counteroffer to a posted price as
> being very rude indeed, and not merely one of a spectrum of valid
> opinions. I don't think I'm alone in this, either: Try stopping by your
> local new car dealer, and offer him 25% of the sticker price of one of
> his vehicles. I doubt you'll get invited inside for further
> negotiations, and you might be rudely surprised at the response you get.
Stupid analogy.
Don't make matters worse for yourself: don't reply!
--
JFB
André Thieme
I don't want to sound offensive, but why doesn't a free lisp offer what
you want?
André
--
Jeff M.
suggestion in another thread spread to economic discussions and general
rants. That's usenet for ya. :-)
However, I'd like to come back to /my/ original argument. I'd like to
reiterate that I have no problem with LW's pricing scheme. $1K is very
fair for the product they offer, and I'd happily pay that. Where I'd
like to see "hobbyist" licensing is when it comes to the maintenance
pricing. What's holding me (personally, I won't venture to speak on
behalf of others that have posted in this thread) back from purchasing
LW right now is the fact that if I want upgrades, I need to spend
another $275/year. Without revenue generated from my original
investment, this is a lot to shell out in the hopes that another
version comes out in a "reasonable" time frame (by reasonable I mean to
say in less time that it would take for $275/year to pay for the next
version).
If LW updates that were covered by the maintenence fees every year or
every 1.5 years, then I could see paying this. But they aren't. They
could be 6 months from now, or 5 years from now. If I don't pay it, and
a significant update happens 3 months later, I'm stuck paying another
$1K if I want those updates. Again, for a hobbyist, this is a lot. It
would be much easier on me to know I could just upgrade (when one comes
out) for 1/2 price or something similar, if I so chose.
I do, however, understand what (I think) is the LW business model. They
don't charge royalties, so I imagine that a large portion of their
revenue for continued development comes from the maintenance fees from
several corporations. Perhaps a hobbyist alternative would be to charge
hobbyists a yearly [maintenance] fee for use of the product en lieu of
the upfront price. I would easily be willing to pay $275/year to use
LW. I do agree with the OP of this thread, though, that there are large
portions of LW that I [as a hobbyist] don't need.
Well, I highly doubt that much of this thread will impact LW's business
model (and it probably shouldn't). However, if anyone from LW is
reading this, and is willing to work out something specific with me,
please feel free to email me and let me know what some available
options are. I'd be very excited about pursuing some of them with you.
Jeff M.
massung [at] gmail
justinhj
Jeff M. wrote:
>> stuff that I snipped
Wow, for $1k you can't download bug fixes to the product, is that what
you're saying?
Justin
Jeff M.
"""
Maintenance offers you:
* free minor Product Releases, such as upgrading from LispWorks 4.3
to LispWorks 4.4, and
* a discount on major Product Releases, such as upgrading from
LispWorks 4.4 to LispWorks 5.0.
Maintenance Contracts last for a fixed period of one year and can only
be purchased in conjunction with a LispWorks license.
"""
So, with just the purchase price (no maintenance), I can go from 4.4 to
4.4.5 (bug fixes). But many times, non-critical bug fixes are held off
until the next minor release (4.4 to 4.5), which I can't get without
paying the maintenance fee.
Also, from the above, it reads as though after 1 year, I can't renew
the maintenance (so if 13 months after the purchase they come out with
4.6 or 5.0, I have to pay full price again).
Jeff M.
Edi Weitz
> Also, from the above, it reads as though after 1 year, I can't renew
> the maintenance (so if 13 months after the purchase they come out
> with 4.6 or 5.0, I have to pay full price again).
That would be pretty dumb, wouldn't it? And of course it's wrong.
As others have already said - if you're really interested you can
always contact LispWorks and ask them. In the long term that's
certainly better than public speculation and spreading misinformation
on Usenet.
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq "spam...@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Herb Martin
news:87d5iy7...@thalassa.informatimago.com...
> If you're not happy with a feature of their software, you just don't
> buy it and everybody's happy:
> - you don't get to use crap software,
> - when they don't sell as many copies as they hoped, they get the
> - signal that their software is not good enough or is too expensive,
> - so they can improve it or lower their price.
>
>
> It's not "everything is fine", is what mechanisms are in place to
> improve things.
>
> The mechanism to improve commercial software is not to buy it. (*)
>
> The mechanism to improve freedom software is to do it your self (or
> contract someone to do it for you).
>
Actually there are other methods, perhaps many other methods
but letting the vendor know is one such method.
Letting others who are considering a purchase know about your
opinion is another.
One lost sale may not convince them, but finding that they
(and this is NOT directed at LispWorks, my example was
specifically for "that other commercial Lisp") gaining a
reputation for even demos that crash is another.
I especially find those (multi-)thousand dollar Lisps which
have a crashing demo or free version to be a joke.
I order or download them once a year or so, find they are
trash, and move on.
But if there is a chance we can encourage the vendors to
improve the situation then it's worth a short note or two.
--
Herb Martin
Larry Clapp
> If I can condense a bit my position, it is to say:
>
> "Hey, LispWorks, I have needs such-and-such and I'm prepared to pay
> so-and-so. How could we work that out?"
>
> It's just that I know that I stand absolutely NO chance of being
> heard if I start this conversation alone with them.
Why don't you try it, and report back?
-- L
Kenny Tilton
> Wade Humeniuk <whumeniu+...@telus.net> writes:
>
>
>>The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
>>if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
>>someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into
>>developing it in something else.
Try saying what I know from experience, "Yes, and the person will have
twenty years of experience in Lisp, have graduated from MIT or Stanford,
be a very good programmer overall, probably be a renowned member of the
Lisp commuity, be able to handle any requirements alone, and be so
grateful for the work that you can get them dirt cheap.
"But not for long, because Lisp is growing fast (provide URLs to Paul
Graham, Peter Seibel, and the Road to Lisp as well as the list of
resumes on the Franz site and probably some cliki somewhere) so demand
for Lisp should be growing soon, but then so will the number of people
who can maintain a Lisp system. In the meantime I can deliver a better
system faster and cheaper because Lisp is that good (show them the RtL
again and Graham).
"If I use Java or C++ it will be less flexible and take longer and if I
move on you will get one thousand resumes instead of ten, and the best
Java/C++ programmers are not looking for your crappy maintenance
project, so you can throw all those resumes away. Not sure what you do
then."
> The question is not whether it can
>>be developed in Lisp, its the security that companies (who can pay
>>for the development) require. This problem is sapping the energy
>>out of me and I am considering dropping out of software development
>>altogether.
>
>
> I can relate, having experienced this situation and resulting quandary
> in the recent past. Perhaps this is the beginning of a "Road from
> Lisp" (RfL) story survey. Kenny would not be pleased.
>
Au contraire. I am all in favor of an RfL and have long wanted to find
someone on it to see what they had to say. Parentheses? <g> But I should
think they would at least have lurked c.l.l, seen the RtL (used to be in
my sig when I had one), and piped up, so maybe they do not exist.
Not sure I want to count people who cannot make money with Lisp, since
few of us can. Yet. The RtL is not about "how I got rich with Lisp", it
is about "how I discovered Lisp". Of course if you stop palying with
Lisp for fun, stop reading c.l.l, uninstall Clisp, ABCL, and both trial
versions, and shore up the beams supporting your office so you can buy
all the Java books, maybe you are a candidate for the RfL.
btw, I hear regularly from someone landing regular small contracts using
Lisp here and Lisp there. They quote two prices, one Lisp, one C++.
You and Wade might be two more people in the grips of self-fulfilling
prophecies.
kenny (taking a break from having so much fun it should be a crime
translating C into Lisp)
Steven E. Harris
> You and Wade might be two more people in the grips of
> self-fulfilling prophecies.
Not I, at least at the moment. I mentioned "recent past", and have
changed jobs since then. My current gig is allowing me to use CL as I
see fit. If we can afford Allegro CL for our coming project, currently
just in prototype phase, I may soon be dragging some coworkers up that
Road-to-Lisp on-ramp.
I can relate to Wade's predicament, though, and consider it luck more
than anything that I was able to dodge it again for a while.
--
Steven E. Harris
Paul Wallich
> On 2006-01-11 18:23:37 +0000, Paul Wallich <p...@panix.com> said:
>
>> The pricing scheme also has to take probable support costs into
>> account. For $0 you're going to assume that the most you get is to
>> ask a clarifying question after having exhausted the manual and all
>> the online resources, or maybe report a clear bug (because in a sense
>> that's as much a benefit to the company as it is a cost). For $200 or
>> $400 people might expect a fair amount of handholding on installation,
>> the odd feature request or three...
>
>
> That's entirely true. But that's for them to handle. I have no say
> in whether their development team is 200 underpaid engineers in India,
> or 4 most talented hackers in the UK. I'm sure they could work out
> a "support structure" that makes business sense for them, on their
> own, without my input.
Ah, but they have.
paul
Bob Felts
> Michael wrote:
> > I can't speak for the original poster, but as for myself, I have a
> > non-lisp related job, a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. I can't afford
> > $1000 for a commercial lisp. I could see spending $200 or $300 for one
> > that had basic features like reading an initialization file and not
> > quitting after 5 hours.
> >
> > You not sharing our situation doesn't change ours or invalidate our opinion.
>
> What the heck do you know about my situation?
>
> If your opinion was limited to "I'm priced out of the Lisp market, but
> I'd be willing to pay $300" that would be one thing. But there's myriad
> free Lisps and Schemes available, and computers powerful enough to run
> them are given away free or put out to the curb on garbage day, thus
> nobody in the first world can claim that they're priced out of the Lisp
> market (and I'll note that the poser who started this thread is posting
> from a Mac).
>
Well, I'm posting from a Mac (a 4 year old PowerBook), have a wife,
three kids (2 in college), a mortgage and a non-lisp job. I downloaded
Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp" and the LispWorks personal edition and
started (re)teaching myself Lisp (it's changed a bit since my copy of
Weissman's "Lisp 1.5 Primer").
I, too, find the $1100 professional edition a bit too much for my
situation right now.
Then, thanks to Google, I found out how to install OpenMCL , GNU Emacs,
and SLIME
(http://blog.zenzoa.com/articles/2005/11/17/installing-lisp-on-mac-os-x,
and I haven't looked back to LispWorks.
While this may not have all of the advantates of LispWorks Professional,
it doesn't have any of the liimitations of the Personal edition.
Or am I missing something?
verec
> Then, thanks to Google, I found out how to install OpenMCL , GNU Emacs,
> and SLIME
> (http://blog.zenzoa.com/articles/2005/11/17/installing-lisp-on-mac-os-x,
> and I haven't looked back to LispWorks.
>
> While this may not have all of the advantates of LispWorks Professional,
> it doesn't have any of the liimitations of the Personal edition.
>
> Or am I missing something?
I'm sure you don't. If OpenMCL+Emacs+SLIME is right for you, why
would you want anything else??
I'm one of those guys who doesn't fancy typing at the keyboard
that much, and who prefers using kinetic memory to access
commands in menus (that sort of unconscious memory) rather than
having to remember C-m C-x shift-K Cttl QZ or other cryptic
incantations.
To each his own :)
--
JFB
David Trudgett
> I downloaded Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp"
That'd be Peter Seibel, I think ;-) Also available in dead tree
version (the book, that is).
Cheers,
David
--
David Trudgett
http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/
The whole system of domination might unravel if the idea of taking
matters into one's own hands spreads its evil tentacles.
-- Noam Chomsky
<http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20041217.htm>
John Thingstad
> Lisp today. A generation failed to learn Lisp, because they weren't
> motivated by its lack of popularity. If they had learned it, it could
> easily be the most widely used programming language in the world
> today. From the points of view of today's lispers, most of those
> users might seem like idiots, and you might think you're better off
> without them, but just think how easy it would be for all lispers to
> get Lisp jobs. Most programming jobs, you're working for idiots
> anyway, but it would be far better to be doing that work in Lisp. And
> there would be more Lisp vendors competing with each other, which is
> the main driving force of innovation.
>
Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for that
matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's.
This is the reason they chose C. As a alternative to assebly language.
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
John Thingstad
There is a limit to what people are willing to pay.
If you exceed that limit wery few people will want it.
You estimate it according to what it will cost.
But unlike say cars there is no production cost only development cost.
So if you miss the market you end up paying 10+ times the same price for
the product.
I feel venerec has a point.
Paul Graham also brings this up in one of his papers.
Bob Felts
> wr...@stablecross.com (Bob Felts) writes:
>
> > I downloaded Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp"
>
> That'd be Peter Seibel, I think ;-) Also available in dead tree
> version (the book, that is).
>
Yes, you're right. I apologize for fat-fingering the name. I came
"this close" to buying the dead tree version for myself for Christmas.
Bill Bradford
without a heap size or time limit" club.
For now, I'm sticking with SBCL/CMUCL + SLIME for my learning
experiences. Then, once I'm "good" at Lisp, maybe by then one of the
commercial vendors will have an offering similar to what I'm looking
for.
Friedrich Dominicus
> Are you positively certain that the car analogy applies?
>
> Software has development costs. Cars do.
> Software has no build cost. Cars do.
Really, on what is software build? Fresh Air?
> Software has no duplication costs. Cars do
Yeah they get burned and packaged for nothing.
> Software has no distribution costs. Cars do.
Oh well the post carries it out for a "Thank you".
--
Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail.
Espen Vestre
> Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for that
> matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's.
Nonsense. To use MCL (or MACL, its name back then, I think) in 1988,
all you needed was a 8Mhz mac with at least 2MB of RAM. Unix lisp
implementations were a little heavier, since they weren't optimized to
run on modest hardware the way MCL was, but that didn't stop people
from doing a lot of fun and useful things with Allegro CL and Lucid
(and later LispWorks) on unix workstations in the late eighties. In
1990 my wife and I borrowed an old mac from the university for home
use (an SE with 2,5MB RAM - most users were already on faster
hardware) and I used that both to do most of the programming behind a
computational linguistics article I presented at EACL 1991 and to
program some small statistical and data entry tools that my wife
needed for her masters thesis.
I think it would have been possible to make something like MCL for the
PC at that time too, at least in 1990 when Win 3.0 was released.
--
(espen)
Edi Weitz
> I think it would have been possible to make something like MCL for
> the PC at that time too, at least in 1990 when Win 3.0 was released.
Wouldn't that be Gold Hill's "Golden Common Lisp?" I didn't use
Windows PCs at that time but it looks like it was available for Win
3.1 and even for DOS.
Espen Vestre
> Wouldn't that be Gold Hill's "Golden Common Lisp?" I didn't use
> Windows PCs at that time but it looks like it was available for Win
> 3.1 and even for DOS.
You're right. I don't think it was as usable on weak hardware as MCL
was, but it definitely made it possible to do serious lisp on a PC
already in the late eighties.
--
(espen)
Pascal Costanza
> On 12 Jan 2006 10:11:26 +0100, Espen Vestre <es...@vestre.net> wrote:
>
>>I think it would have been possible to make something like MCL for
>>the PC at that time too, at least in 1990 when Win 3.0 was released.
>
> Wouldn't that be Gold Hill's "Golden Common Lisp?" I didn't use
> Windows PCs at that time but it looks like it was available for Win
> 3.1 and even for DOS.
Also Star Sapphire Common Lisp - see http://www.webweasel.com/lisp/lisp.htm
The requirements listed on that page do not sound very demanding.
Pascal
--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Closer to MOP & ContextL:
http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
John Thingstad
For the record I am not arguing that it was impossible.
Just that very few people did it.
For one thing back in 1990 my machine had 640 K memeory a 20 Mb hardisk
and ran a 10 MHz 8088.. Not the sort of thing you would want to run lisp
on.
Now on my workstation at university that was a different matter.
carlos...@gmail.com
> For one thing back in 1990 my machine had 640 K memeory a 20 Mb hardisk
> and ran a 10 MHz 8088.. Not the sort of thing you would want to run lisp on.
I guess this was not a typical 1990 machine, given that i486 had
already been introduced in 1989 (i386 in 1985, i286 in 1982).
Espen Vestre
> For one thing back in 1990 my machine had 640 K memeory a 20 Mb hardisk
> and ran a 10 MHz 8088.. Not the sort of thing you would want to run
> lisp on.
Come on, the 8088 hit the market at the end of the /seventies/! And
the 386 was introduced in 1985... In 1990 crippled PCs with 386SX or
286 were still common, AFAIR, but your 8088 must have been quite old.
Even on DOS people of course used more than 640K memory before Windows
3.0 came in 1990, so I guess a fair judgement would be that e.g. 1988,
you could already run lisp on a standard (not high-end) pc ("ibm
compatible" or mac), but it had to be equipped with more memory than
the usual off-the-shelf pc had at that time (which probably was 1MB
for the mac and 640K for the ibm compatible?).
--
(espen)
John Thingstad
Yes, it was a bit behind the times. I got a 386 back in 1992 I think..
newsma...@gustad.com
> "John Thingstad" <john.th...@chello.no> writes:
>
> > Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for that
> > matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's.
>
> Nonsense. To use MCL (or MACL, its name back then, I think) in 1988,
> all you needed was a 8Mhz mac with at least 2MB of RAM. Unix lisp
> implementations were a little heavier, since they weren't optimized to
I was running ExperLisp by Expertelligence on my Macintosh around
1986. This was an 8MHz Motorola 68000 machine.
Petter
--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
John Thingstad
> Espen Vestre <es...@vestre.net> writes:
>
>> "John Thingstad" <john.th...@chello.no> writes:
>>
>> > Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for that
>> > matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's.
>>
>> Nonsense. To use MCL (or MACL, its name back then, I think) in 1988,
>> all you needed was a 8Mhz mac with at least 2MB of RAM. Unix lisp
>> implementations were a little heavier, since they weren't optimized to
>
> I was running ExperLisp by Expertelligence on my Macintosh around
> 1986. This was an 8MHz Motorola 68000 machine.
>
> Petter
For the record say you need a 32 bit processor and about 2 Mb of RAM
to run Lisp effectivly. That should give you some idea who could run
Lisp around 1990. 68000 6820 etc or 386 on up could obviously run it.
Then again very few did. And most of those who did did it on UNIX.
I used a Sun 360 (68020 with math coprocesor, BSD UNIX) with 16 mb of RAM.
That obviously ran Lisp fine (I used scheme back then.)
Wade Humeniuk
>> The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
>> if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
>> someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into developing
>> it in something else. The question is not whether it can be developed
>> in Lisp, its the security that companies (who can pay for the
>> development)
>> require.
>
>
> I cam enpathise with what you say, and would agree that Lisp in
> the enterprise is a non starter (in most cases) for the same reason
> that Python/Ruby etc... are non starters either.
>
I consider this particular case fairly unique. The quote I am giving
is for the first part of a 3 Phase development project. The first phase
is a prototype to run a field trial. Simple data entry with the data
collected and analysed at a central machine. The others quoting on phase 1
are saying they will use MS Access to build the entry interfaces
and Reports. The main problem is that when the project would be complete
the result will be shared with about 30 other companies, who will probably
need the source to modify and integrate for their own systems.
Thanks for the heads up about Eclipse, I was considering Visual Studio
C#, but this might work out better (at least there some CL-like Lisps
that run on top of Java).
Wade
ji...@mit.jyu.fi
> I was running ExperLisp by Expertelligence on my Macintosh around
> 1986. This was an 8MHz Motorola 68000 machine.
Few years back, I found (and forgot) a Lisp called ComLisp for Commodore 64.
It was made at 1985 by Janne Sinkkonen and sold by Amersoft. Just found it
again, and when time will, I'll try to run it.
Certainly there's been small Lisps for small computers, even Altair has one
I think. I just haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, and running on a C64
it is a nice peculiarity.
Jonne
newsma...@gustad.com
> Few years back, I found (and forgot) a Lisp called ComLisp for
> Commodore 64. It was made at 1985 by Janne Sinkkonen and sold by
I have a BYTE magazine from 1979. It has a great cover picture, two
astronauts on a moon/planet looking up on a rock with carved in LISP
code.
There is an article about implementing Lisp on the 6800. There's also
an article by John Allen of Signetics with a quote saying: "LISP is a
higher level machine language".
Ray Fink
> Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for that
> matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's.
My mileage varied :). In 1990 one of my customers deployed a scheduling
system that I wrote in Lisp (Gold Hill's Golden Common Lisp). The
platform was a 386/25 PC, 640K RAM with 16MB of extended memory, and
Windows 3.0. By 1992 we had upgraded to Windows 3.1 and added an Oracle
back-end database running on the same machine. I'm not saying it was
always speedy, but it was usable.
That application is still in daily use today. As you might imagine,
performance is excellent on current-generation PC's.
Raymond Toy
John> Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for
John> that matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's. This
John> is the reason they chose C. As a alternative to assebly
I ran Microport Unix on my 286 PC around '85 or so. Worked just
fine. I also ran some version of Mumath/Mulisp back then too.
Ray
Paul Wallich
> You and many others seem to be missing a important point.
> There is a limit to what people are willing to pay.
> If you exceed that limit wery few people will want it.
> You estimate it according to what it will cost.
> But unlike say cars there is no production cost only development cost.
That is, unfortunately, not really true. As soon as you get out of the
"give your credit card number to Kagi and download a file" model of
software sales and distribution, there's a definite production cost. And
if you're a reputable company there are also per-unit maintenance costs.
And the costs of setting up the structures to provide per-unit services.
Sure, the per-unit production/distribution/support cost is lower
compared to development cost than for a car or a plane or whatever, but
not zero, and not negligible.
paul
Paul Wallich
> Edi Weitz wrote:
>
>> On 12 Jan 2006 10:11:26 +0100, Espen Vestre <es...@vestre.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I think it would have been possible to make something like MCL for
>>> the PC at that time too, at least in 1990 when Win 3.0 was released.
>>
>>
>> Wouldn't that be Gold Hill's "Golden Common Lisp?" I didn't use
>> Windows PCs at that time but it looks like it was available for Win
>> 3.1 and even for DOS.
>
>
> Also Star Sapphire Common Lisp - see http://www.webweasel.com/lisp/lisp.htm
>
> The requirements listed on that page do not sound very demanding.
There was even a commercial lisp (pre-CL) that ran on CP/M machines,
albeit actually doing anything with it required prohibitive hackery
because of the address space limitations. (And CL would have been per se
impossible)
paul
Cameron MacKinnon
> On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:16:03 -0500, Cameron MacKinnon
> <cmack...@clearspot.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Who is more likely to have the optimal pricing strategy, an
>>unsuccessful[1] person who won't even put his name to his opinion, or a
>
>
> His opinion is widely shared. It's based on common sense. Just
> because he doesn't like the price doesn't mean he's unsuccessful. The
What I see is a man begging. He likely doesn't plead poverty in his
daily transactions in the real world, he has enough shame not to beg
using his real name online, and he's artful enough to swaddle his
arguments in claims of mutual benefit. He likely doesn't think himself a
beggar, but as an empowered consumer, part of the great invisible hand
of the market. Fact is, with only 1/4 the gold required, Cheapside Man
is too poor to enter the marketplace. And even if the price was cut 75%,
there'd inevitably be an even poorer man offering only 1/3 of that [We
now take a moment to welcome Bill Bradford, another Mac user, with his
bid of $100. Sheesh, maybe one of the vendors should become "Steve Jobs
Approved" and double the price for their Mac port.]
> The pricing strategies of the major commercial Lisp vendors are left
> over from a time when the software market expected such high prices.
I don't know what you mean by saying the market expects a certain price.
Do you mean *you*?. Every market has its camp-followers who are
'expecting' a lower price. Every product has its costs, and if it costs
more than the broad market 'expects' to pay, then it won't be produced,
absent cross-subsidies. Patently, the existing commercial vendors are
extracting enough from the current market to stay in business. They're
an existence proof, you might say, that there's enough of a market
'expecting' their current prices.
> The number of computer users in the world was a tiny fraction of what
> it is now. But such pricing strategies became obsolete in the 1980's,
> when companies such as Borland made some programming languages popular
> by pricing their products, such as Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, etc., at $99
> per copy, and started selling them to the mass market.
At that time, a larger fraction of computer purchasers could be expected
to buy development tools, and the market was growing annually at high
double and low triple digit percentages. Borland wasn't competing
against a half dozen high quality, widely known free implementations,
either -- they were bidding to dominate the entire bottom end of the
programming tools market. Under those conditions, $99 might have made sense.
I can't say I've been keeping up with the prices of tools for various
other languages, but If I had to guess, I'd say that most languages have
one or two "free" implementations, but not $200 (i.e. inflation
adjusted) commercial implementations. They would start, I'd imagine, at
$400 for mass-market tools and higher for specialty tools. E.g. random
checking shows Intel's C++ compiler for Linux is $400, IBM's Visual Age
Smalltalk is $1,656. Hmm, looks like MS VS2005 Standard Edition is $300.
Can we put that down to a subsidy? I'd say it's probably the biggest
selling developer tool that there is, and I'd further guess that no
matter how low Lisp vendors' prices go, they won't sell a tenth of
Visual Studio's volume. So why should they price at VS's possibly
subsidized level? Do you have a different view of the current market?
The price you're quoting is 20 years stale.
> A lot of lispers seem to think the two main Lisp vendors did a lot of
> sophisticated market research etc. and came up with the optimal
> pricing strategies. But when did they do that research? When was the
> last time their pricing strategies changed? Was it when the number of
> computers in the world was a very tiny fraction of what it is now? If
> you use your common sense you can see that it's not necessarily true
> that they still know what they're doing. They may just keep improving
> their products and continuing to sell them the same way they have all
> those years. Because, maybe, that's all they know how to do.
I think that the two main Lisp vendors engage in market research with
every customer contact, every browsing of c.l.l and the blogs, and
attendance at every conference and trade show. They compete not only
with each other (on features, price and licensing terms), but with
"free" implementations, other languages, and likely various other
parties. When someone suggests that their market is so inefficient that
they've remained viable with prices that are 400% of optimum, I get
sceptical. When these suggestions come from anonymous, self-interested
persons, I suspect that they are either so lacking in business acumen as
to be unable to run a lemonade stand, or actively evil, in the sense
that they don't care about the long term prospects of a company whose
revenue model has been so shocked, as long as they get their discounts
up front.
At least Cheapside Man is finally coming clean in his more recent posts
-- he wants these vendors to fire all their talent and subcontract to
the subcontinent, replacing their reputedly outstanding technical
support with the insufferable, voice-mail jail variety, all so he can
have champagne on his beer budget. The problem is that much of the
corporate memory of the vendors is in the heads of their developers and
executives.
Maybe the vendors could relocate all their staff to an ashram in India,
take a 90% pay cut, and convince their current premium customers that
support will continue to be wonderful, even when Cheapside Man becomes
representative of 60% of their customer base.
There's hope. Jeff Massung plays the role of Homo Economicus and asks
himself what the vendor needs to remain viable (a regular, continuing
revenue stream), then speculates on what level might make sense for both
parties. Whereas you just know Cheapside Man isn't interested in ongoing
support, and his fellow travellers are even more explicit about what
features need to be added to the free version so that they can continue
to comfortably use it without any inconvenience (such as might be
entailed by becoming a "customer").
Anyway, my view is that these products must be damn good to generate a
continuing stream of people willing to beg for discounts in public. If I
were a major corporate customer that saw Lisp as part of my strategic
advantage, I might suggest that the vendors keep prices as is, or even
raise them, just so I could be assured of that top-drawer service when I
needed it, rather than being stuck in the telephone queue behind
Cheapside Man.
Thomas A. Russ
>
> "John Thingstad" <john.th...@chello.no> writes:
>
> > Nonsense. The PC didn't have the capacity to run lisp or for that
> > matter UNIX in the early 90's let alone the 80's.
>
> Nonsense. To use MCL (or MACL, its name back then, I think) in 1988,
> all you needed was a 8Mhz mac with at least 2MB of RAM.
I don't think you even needed that much. I seem to recall running
really early versions on a MacPlus, which was limited to 1MB of RAM,
but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.
--
Thomas A. Russ, USC/Information Sciences Institute
Espen Vestre
> I don't think you even needed that much. I seem to recall running
> really early versions on a MacPlus, which was limited to 1MB of RAM,
> but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.
Your memory isn't playing tricks on you, I also started using it on a
1MB machine. But it was somewhat painful (I remember long GC halts
just by selecting something from the menu bar ;-)) - whereas on my
2,5MB machine I could really play around without hitting the celing.
--
(espen)
Bill Bradford
> And even if the price was cut 75%, there'd inevitably be an even poorer man offering only 1/3 of
> that [We now take a moment to welcome Bill Bradford, another Mac user, with his bid of $100.
> Sheesh, maybe one of the vendors should become "Steve Jobs Approved" and double the
> price for their Mac port.]
That price was thrown out as an example off the top of my head. I'd be
gladly willing to pay more, but it's hard to justify $1100 to the wife
(she who handles the bills) for software that would just be used for
"fiddling around" and educational purposes here at home. For that
much, I can buy a MacIvory system!
I'm not arguing that the prices are too high; I'm just casting a vote
in favor of a "more than the free version, yet cheaper than the full
package, with restrictions on commercial use" option.
Bill
Bill Bradford
>Add me to the "I'd gladly pay $100 or so for a version of Lispworks PE
>without a heap size or time limit" club.
Before I get attacked again (and what does me being a Mac user have to
do with anything?), I'd of course be willing to pay more than $100 - I
just can't afford $1.1K. I'm using the Personal Edition, but would be
willing to pay more for a "lesser crippled" version of the PE.
Bill
Stefan Scholl
> Wade Humeniuk <whumeniu+...@telus.net> writes:
>> The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
>> if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
>> someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into
>> developing it in something else. The question is not whether it can
> in the recent past. Perhaps this is the beginning of a "Road from
> Lisp" (RfL) story survey. Kenny would not be pleased.
But why say "no"?
A programmer should be able to use more than one language. And
maintaining code is very helpful when you learn a "new" language.
Q: "Can someone else pick up that code when you leave."
A: "Yes, a programmer can."
At my current job I have to deal with some languages I haven't
encountered before and wouldn't have chosen myself. So my
predecessor hasn't thought this could be any trouble for other
programmers.
--
Web: http://www.no-spoon.de/ -*- IRC: stesch @ freenode
Lars Brinkhoff
> I have a BYTE magazine from 1979. It has a great cover picture, two
> astronauts on a moon/planet looking up on a rock with carved in LISP
> code.
Maybe made with secret alien technology?
Thomas F. Burdick
> > I wrote:
> >Add me to the "I'd gladly pay $100 or so for a version of Lispworks PE
> >without a heap size or time limit" club.
>
> Before I get attacked again (and what does me being a Mac user have to
> do with anything?)
Add me to the "I'd gladly pay $100 or so for Giovanni rims" club. I
can't justify the price they're asking now -- I'm on a budget, after
all. What does me driving a Cadillac have to do with anything?
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! |
,--' _,' | Abolish the racist |
/ / | death penalty! |
( -. | `-----------------------'
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Tayssir John Gabbour
> On 2006-01-10 12:18:07 +0000, usenet-...@abbrvtd.org.uk (Duncan
> Harvey) said:
>
> >> There should be "hobbyist" licenses for LispWorks and Allegro. I'd love
> >> to shell out the $1K+ price, but with matenance fees and no real income
> >> being produced from it, I have a hard time convincing myself to do so.
> >> Even 1/2 the price (or no upgrade fees) would make it worthwhile.
> >> *cough* (hint) *cough*
> >
> > What do you want that, say, LispWorks Personal Edition doesn't offer?
> > Executable generation? Unrestricted memory heap size?
>
> Since we're hobyyist, we don't need CORBA or binary delivery (they
> are indeed useful, but as a "hobbyist" I can live without), and
> I'm not interested _at all_ in either SQL or Prolog.
>
> What I'd be happy with, if the "hobbyist edition price" was right:
>
> what the Persobal Edition currently is but:
>
> 1. actually read the .ini file
> 2. no artificial "Quit after 5 hours"
>
> I've been delaying the purchase for weeks, for exactly the
> same reasons as Jeff. My "pay-the-bills" job is in Java, and
> I don't see it switching to Lisp in the immediate future.
>
> I also understand that LW cannot afford to canibalise their
> sales of the professional edition, but my guess is that leaving
> out the application delivery from the hobbyist edition is what
> would draw people who need it to the professional edition.
>
> Just my 2p :)
Why oh why when someone asks a simple question like this, which is
really no different than asking about a free Lisp's technical
attributes, the thread inevitably descends into madness? It's like
watching some blogger go nuts against some language's parentheses or
whitespace indentation.
;)
Anyway, there's some merit in asking privately, as some companies are
willing to bargain in special cases. The problem with doing this
publicly is then current customers are more likely to start dealing
down prices too.
Speaking of the snobbish comments on being poor and a pauper, here's
the wealth distribution of the US, for a good idea of what you're up
against... Perhaps you're not from the US, but it's worth keeping in
mind in terms of what markets are more feasible...
http://faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
Tayssir
Frank Buss
> On the economic matters I have to agree very few people seem willing
> to pay anything for things of value, especially when it comes to
> programming. The trend seems to be having developer tools available for
> free (the only exception seeming to be the MS Visual Studio Set of tools).
At least the Microsoft compiler with all the Windows libraries is free
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/
Maybe there is no IDE included, but I have bought the MSDN with Visual
Studio included anyway, so I don't need it :-)
But there are free IDEs for Lisp, like Lisp-in-a-box. And regarding the
list of feature verec would like to have: "binary delivery" is possible
with some patches, like I've demonstrated at
http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/clisp.html and for SQL there are free Lisp
libraries, too.
If you don't want to pay the full price for LispWorks, you can build your
own system, but currently the time needed for this costs more than buying
it (if you are paid at regular rates as a programmer). On the other side:
Building such a system as a hobby can help you to learn Lisp and might be
fun. That's one of the reason why an IDE is on the task list of my
Application Builder: http://wiki.alu.org/Application_Builder
BTW: I have bought LispWorks, because I don't like Emacs from Lisp-in-a-box
and for building my own IDE and other programs, first I need a good IDE.
--
Frank Buss, f...@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Edi Weitz
> At least the Microsoft compiler with all the Windows libraries is free
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/
> Maybe there is no IDE included
The current free version comes with a full IDE:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx>
Of course, Microsoft has other sources of income than just Visual
Studio... :)
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq "spam...@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
John Thingstad
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:02:30 +0100, Frank Buss <f...@frank-buss.de> wrote:
>
>> At least the Microsoft compiler with all the Windows libraries is free
>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/
>> Maybe there is no IDE included
>
> The current free version comes with a full IDE:
>
> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx>
>
> Of course, Microsoft has other sources of income than just Visual
> Studio... :)
>
> Cheers,
> Edi.
>
Truth with modifications.
It is a beta version that expires in april I think.
Then a commercial IDE will come along for 50$ or so.
(not a show stopper..)
Note that this is a bit hobbled. It in it's default
setup only runs against .net.
It is a part of their maketing stratergy to move people over
to .net and the free coomand line environment is a attept
to undermine gcc's and mingw's position.
That being said is IS a much better compiler than gcc if you
are to trust the performance stats.
The also have a VB and C# version for free now.
John Thingstad
Well I never had a computer that didn't pay for itsef by the software I
developed.
Is it so far fecthed to make some commecial software and then make a deal
with LispWorks?
You will still have to pay but I am sure the terms of payment can be
negotiated.
Seen this one?
> We are looking for programmers at all levels,
> from fresher to experienced
> Freshers will be trained if we find them suitable for our
> organisation will pay the training and certification fees
> we require programmers for all our offshore clients mainly
> into
> vb,asp,sql,vb.net,asp.net,java,jsp,C#,php & Mysql
> xml,com,dcom,c,c++,ORacle,SQL, web designers,
> we also require SAP and mainframe professionals
> No mass emailing and junk emails
> Apply direct
> http://www.websol.co.in
> and click on " work with us" option
> please allow us 15 days to scan the c.v's and other details dont
> call up.
> we pay on hourly basis
> we pay min $10 per hour and max $35 per hour
> We Also do International Placements,help in migration services
> you can even work from home, all facilities provided by us
> Excellent Coders will be given a laptop and high speed broad band
> internet connection within 1 months time he can get this.
> no need to come to office you can work from your home and salary
> will be directly deposited to your bank alc
> you have a choice you can work from home and can also come to office
> whenever you like
>
Now argue that they would be better off with Lisp and you are half way
there.
Just my two bits..
Edi Weitz
> Truth with modifications.
> It is a beta version that expires in april I think.
No, it's a full version that doesn't expire.
> Then a commercial IDE will come along for 50$ or so.
No, you can download the full version for free until November 2006.
Afterwards, i.e. if you don't have it already, you'll have to pay
fifty bucks:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/faq/default.aspx#pricing>
"Do customers who acquire the Visual Studio Express products
during the free promotional pricing period have to pay after the
first year if they want to continue to use them?
No, as long as you download Visual Studio Express on or before
November 7th 2006, you will not have to pay for it."
Please get the facts right and stop posting misinformation.
Wade Humeniuk
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:02:30 +0100, Frank Buss <f...@frank-buss.de> wrote:
>
>> At least the Microsoft compiler with all the Windows libraries is free
>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/
>> Maybe there is no IDE included
>
> The current free version comes with a full IDE:
>
> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx>
>
> Of course, Microsoft has other sources of income than just Visual
> Studio... :)
>
Yes indeed. I have downloaded Visual C# 2005 Express. It does come with all the
IDE I think I need. Just a mod to Frank Busses note, the version is 2005 not
2003. So even VS is essentially free now.
Wade
Bill Bradford
>> Before I get attacked again (and what does me being a Mac user have to
>> do with anything?)
>Add me to the "I'd gladly pay $100 or so for Giovanni rims" club. I
>can't justify the price they're asking now -- I'm on a budget, after
>all. What does me driving a Cadillac have to do with anything?
So the fact that I have a Mac means that I have unlimited funds to
spend on software?
It's an iMac G5. List price of $1299 or so. I couldn't afford
anything better.
Bill
Tayssir John Gabbour
> The battle I face currently for using Lisp is that companies wonder
> if I leave will the software I wrote be able to be picked up by
> someone else. I am forced to answer no and am prodded into developing
> in Lisp, its the security that companies (who can pay for the development)
> considering dropping out of software development altogether.
>
> Wade
Incidentally, the following is a fairly novel approach to the "ain't no
Lisp coderz!" problem (though of course I don't know whether it is
meaningful for your situation):
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060112.html
"In addition to normal Tech Coop development work, the Tech Coop will
take on Lisp development work as subcontracted development efforts.
This helps other Lisp developers who are trying to get Lisp contracts
solve the 'but there are no Lisp developers' mantra (which is a concern
that potential customers often express when they are considering hiring
an independent contractor to do some work). The Tech Coop has an
experienced development team (which includes Drew Crampsie, Bill
Clementson and Alastair Bridgewater), so the 'what do I do if my
developer gets hit by a bus' type of problem doesn't have to be an
issue. :-) This is one of the faster growing services, as clients often
need assurance that they can turn to another party if they need
support. It also gives independent consultants the opportunity to
subcontract out Lisp support work to the Tech Coop when they are either
overloaded or planning to be away."
" Lisp Tech support : CAD$50-CAD$80/hr
Peace of mind : Priceless :-)"
Tayssir
Ulrich Hobelmann
> No, you can download the full version for free until November 2006.
> Afterwards, i.e. if you don't have it already, you'll have to pay
> fifty bucks:
>
> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/faq/default.aspx#pricing>
>
> "Do customers who acquire the Visual Studio Express products
> during the free promotional pricing period have to pay after the
> first year if they want to continue to use them?
>
> No, as long as you download Visual Studio Express on or before
> November 7th 2006, you will not have to pay for it."
>
> Please get the facts right and stop posting misinformation.
I heard a MS-sponsored presentation about .NET just yesterday, and they
said the same about the cost of VStudio Express. The good is that the
Express edition allows you to use it commercially (while for instance an
academic-license, free version of VStudio Standard doesn't), but the
catch is that it only allows managed (CLR) code.
If you want to link with C, C++, Assembler ... for a commercial app, you
have to pay. Of course a little cost shouldn't be a problem for
commercial apps.
--
the bottom line is that a JavaSchool that won't teach C and won't teach
Scheme is not really teaching computer science, either. -- Joel Spolsky
Wade Humeniuk
>
> Incidentally, the following is a fairly novel approach to the "ain't no
> Lisp coderz!" problem (though of course I don't know whether it is
> meaningful for your situation):
>
>
> http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060112.html
>
> "In addition to normal Tech Coop development work, the Tech Coop will
> take on Lisp development work as subcontracted development efforts.
> This helps other Lisp developers who are trying to get Lisp contracts
> solve the 'but there are no Lisp developers' mantra (which is a concern
> that potential customers often express when they are considering hiring
> an independent contractor to do some work). The Tech Coop has an
> experienced development team (which includes Drew Crampsie, Bill
> Clementson and Alastair Bridgewater), so the 'what do I do if my
> developer gets hit by a bus' type of problem doesn't have to be an
> issue. :-) This is one of the faster growing services, as clients often
> need assurance that they can turn to another party if they need
> support. It also gives independent consultants the opportunity to
> subcontract out Lisp support work to the Tech Coop when they are either
> overloaded or planning to be away."
>
> " Lisp Tech support : CAD$50-CAD$80/hr
> Peace of mind : Priceless :-)"
>
This is a really good thing. And, since the quote is in Canadian and
so am I this is even better. Isn't Bill C in Vancouver? The work
I am quoting for is for a private research organization in Vancouver.
Ahh, a quick check of the web site does indeed show that they are in Van.
I happen to be in Calgary.
As a note I am still going after the Phase I work to be done in CL.
Even if I was a C# expert the time to do the prototype work is faster
in CL. Since the prototype is not deliverable to members the client
side of the system can be rewritten in C# when the system's specs
and functionality is hardened up. The rewrite for this system would
be trivial once it is well thought out. The reasoning I am applying is
that CL will be great for the constantly fluctuating specs in the prototype
stage, needing a handful of rewrites/re-orgs.
Wade
John Thingstad
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:09:17 +0100, "John Thingstad"
> <john.th...@chello.no> wrote:
>
>> Truth with modifications.
>> It is a beta version that expires in april I think.
>
> No, it's a full version that doesn't expire.
>
>> Then a commercial IDE will come along for 50$ or so.
>
> No, you can download the full version for free until November 2006.
> Afterwards, i.e. if you don't have it already, you'll have to pay
> fifty bucks:
>
> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/faq/default.aspx#pricing>
>
> "Do customers who acquire the Visual Studio Express products
> during the free promotional pricing period have to pay after the
> first year if they want to continue to use them?
>
> No, as long as you download Visual Studio Express on or before
> November 7th 2006, you will not have to pay for it."
>
> Please get the facts right and stop posting misinformation.
>
Well I have a version wich is beta and expires in april.
Amittebly I have not followed up the link since october.
I find it offencive that you think I am giving misinformation.
Nevertheless I shall update my info.
I respect you and your contributions to the lisp comunity.
They are indeed greater than mine.
Nevertheless a bit of a cut in arrogance would help.
John
Edi Weitz
> Well I have a version wich is beta and expires in april.
> Amittebly I have not followed up the link since october.
> I find it offencive that you think I am giving misinformation.
> Nevertheless I shall update my info.
> I respect you and your contributions to the lisp comunity.
> They are indeed greater than mine.
> Nevertheless a bit of a cut in arrogance would help.
My apologies if you felt offended. However, I stand by my claim that
posting wrong facts is, well, misinformation. Note that I didn't say
"disinformation" and I didn't try to imply that you're spreading
incorrect data deliberately. You /did/ reply to something I posted
without checking first (I even provided a link), though, and your
posting started with "Truth with modifications" - whatever /that/
means... (One could construe this as meaning "You posted
misinformation and I am going to correct it." Not that I would do
that... :)
Cheers,
Edi.
Steven E. Harris
> But why say "no"?
I haven't' been asked the question, but have been handed the
supposedly unquestionable assertion that proceeding with CL would
force the company to try to hire rare, weird people to deal with this
weird joke of a language, and obviously these people are neither
plentiful nor desirable as employees.
But even that is giving the scenario too much credit. More commonly,
it stops before the human resources question, with the management just
not even believing that one could build a suitable program at all with
such a language.
--
Steven E. Harris
Cameron MacKinnon
> verec wrote:
>>What I'd be happy with, if the "hobbyist edition price" was right:
> Why oh why when someone asks a simple question like this, which is
> really no different than asking about a free Lisp's technical
> attributes, the thread inevitably descends into madness?
If someone posed a technical question akin to "Isn't foo-CL's read
function 10x slower than it could be?" he'd be asked to provide some of
the reasoning behind his supposition, and if his main arguments
consisted of claims that it's common sense, a widely shared opinion, or
that he just couldn't afford for it to be so slow, he'd be dismissed.
Should our standards be lower for people who question the accuracy of a
Lisp vendor's pricing function?
Children are socialized from an early age, and learn that it's rude* to
offer playmates, friends, strangers and common businessmen ten cents on
the dollar for their possessions. Offering a man 1/10th of his price
carries the clear implication that either he was trying to cheat you at
the old price, or you're trying to cheat him with the new one.
Goods with low unit costs, such as software, certainly allow for greater
flexibility of price and units sold, but there has never been a business
yet with margins high enough that it could cut prices by 90% and still
be high margin. So asking for such is asking a company to rework its
entire business model, and that's a pretty big ask from a couple of guys
waving mitts full of Hamiltons.
> Speaking of the snobbish comments on being poor and a pauper, here's
> the wealth distribution of the US, for a good idea of what you're up
> against... Perhaps you're not from the US, but it's worth keeping in
> mind in terms of what markets are more feasible...
I was merely trying to keep the argument to the somewhat sterile
economic view where people are categorized into those who see more
utility in LW than in $1,100 and those who don't. I'm not denying them
their daily bread, a roof over their head or medical care, and the
market doesn't even deny them Lisp, because there's good, free Lisps.
But that's not good enough for them. They show up in public trailing a
wife in a homemade frock and a couple of sooty-faced kids, and the wife
starts screaming "Please Mister Lisp vendor, we've tried those free
Lisps and we tried your Personal Edition but the baby can't keep them
down and he's losing weight. Bill's working as hard as he can with the
two jobs and all but the bank takes so much every month and $100 is all
we can afford and we had to sell Bill's bicycle just to get that so now
he'll have to walk to work."
Ridiculous, no? I had rather hoped that we could tacitly assume that,
for nearly all of the first-world readers of this NG, $1,100 is at most
ten days' labour. If they've got leisure time, a computer (Mac?), 'net
access and a vocation or avocation in programming, they're likely part
of the demographic that spent $1,100 last year on a foreign vacation,
golf, a new television or perhaps even fancy coffee. If they've forsaken
such luxuries in favour of women, children, real estate or higher
education, that again is a choice. But regardless of where they've spent
the discretionary thousands, it takes a lot of nerve for these people to
confront software vendors with "I spent the rest on things that were
more important to me. How about you give me the fruits of your labours
at 90% off? C'mon, it's not going to cost you anything."
* - I can only speak for my experiences in the occident. However I
suspect that even in cultures where bargaining for daily goods is the
norm, offering a price far enough below the market is considered rude,
again because it suggests someone's being less than honest.
verec
<cmack...@clearspot.net> said:
[...]
> * - I can only speak for my experiences in the occident. However I
> suspect that even in cultures where bargaining for daily goods is the
> norm, offering a price far enough below the market is considered rude,
> again because it suggests someone's being less than honest.
You are misrepresenting the facts. AGAIN.
I never EVER suggested to LOWER the price of ANY current
edition.
I have NEVER ever offered "10 cents on the dollar"
What I HAVE suggested, is a rescaling of the "features/prices"
scale in such a way that neither the bottom = $0 revenue,
nor the top = $1100 revenue would be affected AT ALL.
Cameron, honestly: you should buy a brain. Even a second-hand
one: I'm sure Apple has one or two spare for you :)
--
JFB
John Thingstad
wrote:
> Edi Weitz wrote:
>> No, you can download the full version for free until November 2006.
>> Afterwards, i.e. if you don't have it already, you'll have to pay
>> fifty bucks:
>>
>> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/faq/default.aspx#pricing>
>> "Do customers who acquire the Visual Studio Express products
>> during the free promotional pricing period have to pay after the
>> first year if they want to continue to use them?
>>
>> No, as long as you download Visual Studio Express on or before
>> November 7th 2006, you will not have to pay for it."
>> Please get the facts right and stop posting misinformation.
>
> I heard a MS-sponsored presentation about .NET just yesterday, and they
> said the same about the cost of VStudio Express. The good is that the
> Express edition allows you to use it commercially (while for instance an
> academic-license, free version of VStudio Standard doesn't), but the
> catch is that it only allows managed (CLR) code.
>
> If you want to link with C, C++, Assembler ... for a commercial app, you
> have to pay. Of course a little cost shouldn't be a problem for
> commercial apps.
>
Exactly. That was lost in Edi's misinformation..
Edi Weitz
> Exactly. That was lost in Edi's misinformation..
What is that? Are you playing childish tit-for-tat games? There
wasn't anything "lost" because we didn't even talk about commercial
deployment before Ulrich mentioned it.
Frank said that maybe there's no IDE (talking about the 2003 version)
and I said that there /is/ an IDE now (in the 2005 version). Then you
chimed in and insisted that what I was talking about was a beta
which'll cease to work in April or so - which was simply wrong.
What's your point?
John Thingstad
> On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 00:07:31 +0100, "John Thingstad"
> <john.th...@chello.no> wrote:
>
>> Exactly. That was lost in Edi's misinformation..
>
> What is that? Are you playing childish tit-for-tat games? There
> wasn't anything "lost" because we didn't even talk about commercial
> deployment before Ulrich mentioned it.
>
> Frank said that maybe there's no IDE (talking about the 2003 version)
> and I said that there /is/ an IDE now (in the 2005 version). Then you
> chimed in and insisted that what I was talking about was a beta
> which'll cease to work in April or so - which was simply wrong.
>
> What's your point?
>
> Note that this is a bit hobbled. It in it's default
> setup only runs against .net.
> It is a part of their maketing stratergy to move people over
> to .net and the free coomand line environment is a attept
> to undermine gcc's and mingw's position.
> That being said is IS a much better compiler than gcc if you
> are to trust the performance stats.
> The also have a VB and C# version for free now.
That point.
I felt that in your eagerness to kill my incorrect date
you killed my entire post.
John Thingstad
<john.th...@chello.no> wrote:
I want to apologize!
Got a bit carried away.
rydis
Well, it's about an order of magnitude more than I've paid for my
computers, and about three to five times as much as you'd need to pay
for a somewhat comparable Linux/x86 box. Similar to a Cadillac,
I guess, though I know very little about cars.
',mr
--
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is
beautiful. -- Neal Stephenson, _In the Beginning was the Command Line_
Peter Herth
> "Bill Bradford" <mrb...@gmail.com> writes:
>>It's an iMac G5. List price of $1299 or so. I couldn't afford
>>anything better.
>
>
> Well, it's about an order of magnitude more than I've paid for my
> computers, and about three to five times as much as you'd need to pay
> for a somewhat comparable Linux/x86 box. Similar to a Cadillac,
> I guess, though I know very little about cars.
Not to start that discussion again, but you really have to show
me a linux box with a 20 inch lcd for 250 to 400 dollars...
Peter
--
Ltk, the easy lisp gui http://www.peter-herth.de/ltk/
Tayssir John Gabbour
> On 2006-01-13 19:17:19 +0000, Cameron MacKinnon
> <cmack...@clearspot.net> said:
> [...]
> > * - I can only speak for my experiences in the occident. However I
> > suspect that even in cultures where bargaining for daily goods is the
> > norm, offering a price far enough below the market is considered rude,
> > again because it suggests someone's being less than honest.
>
> You are misrepresenting the facts. AGAIN.
>
> I never EVER suggested to LOWER the price of ANY current
> edition.
>
> I have NEVER ever offered "10 cents on the dollar"
>
> What I HAVE suggested, is a rescaling of the "features/prices"
> scale in such a way that neither the bottom = $0 revenue,
> nor the top = $1100 revenue would be affected AT ALL.
You know, you're being trolled. ;) Here's something to read more up on
it.
http://linux.nullcode.org/troll.txt
I mean really; who writes in such a manner, designed not to inform or
state disagreement, but to prod visceral responses?
Tayssir