Free Lisp with GUI
Johann Murauer
I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and Linux.
My question: is there a free (or very cheap) lisp implementation which
either has a build-in GUI or has an easy interface to Qt, GTK or
something similar that runs under Linux and Win32.
(If not I have to do the programming in C++, but maybe I could run
some subporcesses in Lisp which will do the logical operations. Is
this possible ?)
May thanks and best regards,
Johann Murauer
jmur...@acm.org
Friedrich Dominicus
> Hi,
>
> I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
> There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
> output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and
> Linux.
You could try LispWorks from Xanalys. IIRC is there cross-platform
GUI-stuff (CAPI) part of the free Version. It works on Windows and
Linux and according to their homepage other Unices too.
>
> My question: is there a free (or very cheap) lisp implementation which
> either has a build-in GUI or has an easy interface to Qt, GTK or
> something similar that runs under Linux and Win32.
CAPI, CLIM should do the job...
>
> (If not I have to do the programming in C++, but maybe I could run
> some subporcesses in Lisp which will do the logical operations. Is
> this possible ?)
Of course you can intermix languages how to do that depends on the
implementation you're using.
Regards
Friedrich
Sam Steingold
> * On the subject of "Free Lisp with GUI"
> * Sent on Wed, 16 Jan 2002 16:32:23 GMT
> * Honorable jmur...@acm.org (Johann Murauer) writes:
>
> (If not I have to do the programming in C++, but maybe I could run
> some subporcesses in Lisp which will do the logical operations. Is
> this possible ?)
you can use a browser as the front-end GUI.
--
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds)
Keep Jerusalem united! <http://www.onejerusalem.org/Petition.asp>
Read, think and remember! <http://www.iris.org.il> <http://www.memri.org/>
You can have it good, soon or cheap. Pick two...
Frederic Brunel
> > I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
> > There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
> > output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and
> > Linux.
> You could try LispWorks from Xanalys. IIRC is there cross-platform
> GUI-stuff (CAPI) part of the free Version. It works on Windows and
> Linux and according to their homepage other Unices too.
I think LispWorks is far from being free!
--
Frederic Brunel
Software Engineer
In-Fusio, The Mobile Fun Connection
Thaddeus L Olczyk
<fr...@q-software-solutions.com> wrote:
>> I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
>> There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
>> output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and
>> Linux.
>You could try LispWorks from Xanalys. IIRC is there cross-platform
>GUI-stuff (CAPI) part of the free Version. It works on Windows and
>Linux and according to their homepage other Unices too.
You should ask why they want a free lisp.
If they want something for delivering open source and free software
then both Franz and LispWorks are not really useful.
You generally distribute your code as both source and executables.
( Do you really want the user to download Xanalys and compile your
address book? )
Producing freely distributed executables with both is ( my
understanding ) highly problematic.
Jim Bushnell
www.xanalys.com) but is limited in its capabilities (heap size, no
stand-alone delivery, etc., but the CAPI GUIS is included).
Jim Bushnell
"Frederic Brunel" <frede...@in-fusio.com> wrote in message
news:laofju5...@buzz.in-fusio.com...
Jonathan Craven
guru by any means) is with Tcl/Tk via the lisp2wish file of Matthias
Lindner (c): <http://ww.telent.net/cliki/Graphics%20Toolkit>. You can
use whatever implementation you want and all your program logic can
stay in Lisp.
I even made a little sourceforge project demonstrating it in action:
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/clslideshow/>, a slideshow program
for gif and jpeg files, but it only works in Linux/Unix right now
because I didn't bother using portable pathnames.
So that's a very easy way to do it that I don't think get's enough
mention, especially if you're on Linux where wish is commonly already
installed, but your project may of course have needs that require a
different solution.
-Jon
(switch "at" and first period to mail me)
Friedrich Dominicus
> On 16 Jan 2002 17:55:06 +0100, Friedrich Dominicus
> <fr...@q-software-solutions.com> wrote:
>
> >> I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
> >> There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
> >> output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and
> >> Linux.
> >You could try LispWorks from Xanalys. IIRC is there cross-platform
> >GUI-stuff (CAPI) part of the free Version. It works on Windows and
> >Linux and according to their homepage other Unices too.
> You should ask why they want a free lisp.
> If they want something for delivering open source and free software
> then both Franz and LispWorks are not really useful.
Well you can write you own open source with it can't you?
> You generally distribute your code as both source and executables.
> ( Do you really want the user to download Xanalys and compile your
> address book? )
Do you really want the user to download Perl to run your address book?
> Producing freely distributed executables with both is ( my
> understanding ) highly problematic.
Higly problematic, I doubt it very much. At least LispWorks is used
for there whole "intelligence" Software and that are all stand-alone
applications. So it should not be very hard to get it done.
Regards
Friedrich
Tim Bradshaw
> Producing freely distributed executables with both is ( my
> understanding ) highly problematic.
For LispWorks at least this is not so for Windows and Linux: you can
generate freely distributable executables for both these platforms
from the commercial product (possibly with some constraints - there
may be stuff like CORBA or something you can't include). I think
there are royalties for the Unix platforms.
--tim
Jochen Schmidt
As far as I understand the new license-terms for LW4.2 (Windows and
Linux) you can include modules like CORBA, CommonSQL, or KnowledgeWorks
without paying royalities.
ciao,
Jochen
Thaddeus L Olczyk
wrote:
Well we begin with the subject-- the person was asking for *free*
lisps. But lets just stop for a moment and assume that a person was
willing to pay something.
Remember this is stuff that the person would like to give away ( it
was clipped but I did say open source/free ). He wants it on both
Windows and Linux ( and possibly other UNICES ) . That's $1800
out of his pocket. Compare that to perl, python, ruby,gcc etc where
you pay nothing.
The upshot of this is that a person who wants to write something and
make it open source ( say he wants to write somethng that finds and
indexs all his mp3s, since he goes to that trouble to write it for
himself, he would like to make it open source ) is better off not
using Lisp. This leads to the idea that Lisp is not used much for
development.
Siegfried Gonzi
> Remember this is stuff that the person would like to give away ( it
> was clipped but I did say open source/free ). He wants it on both
> Windows and Linux ( and possibly other UNICES ) . That's $1800
> out of his pocket. Compare that to perl, python, ruby,gcc etc where
> you pay nothing.
>
> The upshot of this is that a person who wants to write something and
> make it open source ( say he wants to write somethng that finds and
> indexs all his mp3s, since he goes to that trouble to write it for
> himself, he would like to make it open source ) is better off not
> using Lisp. This leads to the idea that Lisp is not used much for
> development.
If the project is not time critical CormanLisp would be a good alternative. As far as I am informed CormanLisp is
Shareware and therefore affordable. But I am not sure how stable CormanLisp actually is.
Otherwise, I do not think that it is the fault (yes, yes you did not say it) of the vendors that there are not
more "sophisticated" Lisp implementations out there.
But I agree with you that Python/Perl/Ruby is lurking. But otherwise (exept for all the GUI stuff) Lisp has got a
good tradition for source-code only; if I can load a file (in the hope without any error messages -- which quite
often does not happen) and compile and use the functions everything will be okay. It is not comparable to a
stand-alone image but every day millions of people are doing actually this in: Matlab, IDL, Yorick,
Mathematica,...
S. Gonzi
Dr. Edmund Weitz
> The upshot of this is that a person who wants to write something and
> make it open source ( say he wants to write somethng that finds and
> indexs all his mp3s, since he goes to that trouble to write it for
> himself, he would like to make it open source ) is better off not
> using Lisp. This leads to the idea that Lisp is not used much for
> development.
My feet! Lots of open-source software is written in Perl, Tcl/Tk,
Python, PHP or other scripting languages where the user of the program
will have to install the interpreter to be able to use it. You can do
the same thing with Common Lisp if you use one of the free (!)
implementations like CMUCL, SBCL, ECL, OpenMCL, or CLISP. With CLISP
alone you will be able to cover most Unix platforms (including Mac OS
X), Linux, Windows, and even Amiga OS IIRC.
Most Linux distributions will install Perl by default, but you'll
usually have to install something like Python or Tcl/Tk yourself,
probably from an RPM that comes with the distro. It's just as easy to
install CLISP nowadays, it's part of SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, and
probably a couple of other distros. On other platforms like, say,
Windows or Solaris, I can see no difference between Perl and CLISP:
You'll have to download and install it before you can use the fabulous
open-source program that was written in that language.
Now, if you complain about not being able to create stand-alone
executables with Perl, you either have to do it yourself or bother
Larry Wall until he does it. You'll probably have to pay someone to do
it for you. With Common Lisp that's easier: You can just buy LispWorks
or AllegroCL and create a stand-alone executable from the same source
code that ran with CLISP or CMUCL (provided it's ANSI compliant).
Edi.
Francois-Rene Rideau
> My question: is there a free (or very cheap) lisp implementation which
> either has a build-in GUI or has an easy interface to Qt, GTK or
> something similar that runs under Linux and Win32.
implementations (bigloo? MIT-Scheme?) have portable GUIs that work
accross platforms (Linux, Win32, and perhaps also MacOS for some of them).
Yours freely,
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
Tradition is the matter of which civilization is made.
Anyone who rejects tradition per se should be left naked in a desert island.
Innovation is the matter with which civilization is built.
Anyone who rejects innovation per se should be left naked in a desert island.
Friedrich Dominicus
>
> Remember this is stuff that the person would like to give away ( it
> was clipped but I did say open source/free ). He wants it on both
> Windows and Linux ( and possibly other UNICES ) . That's $1800
> out of his pocket. Compare that to perl, python, ruby,gcc etc where
> you pay nothing.
Well he could use CMUCL couldn't he or CLISP or. Well he want to use a
cross-platform GUI-Toolkit. Well there is not much available for the
free Lisps, but it's part of the free verson of LispWorks. So he could
use the free version and distribute his code for free. If people want
to have it than they have to install LispWorks on their own. I can't
see why this should be more tedious than to install either python,
perl, ruby, gcc on Windows. Where's the difference? Why is it ok to
install everything else but a Lisp?
>
> The upshot of this is that a person who wants to write something and
> make it open source ( say he wants to write somethng that finds and
> indexs all his mp3s, since he goes to that trouble to write it for
> himself, he would like to make it open source ) is better off not
> using Lisp.
Nonsense, as pointed out below. You can distribute as much
code written by you as you like -- from any langauge. Well you own
VCC++ (fine you can write your code with it). Well you have to pay for
VCC++ too but obviously it is unimportant for most of the people, the
buy that stuff on Windows and are not using GCC. Well again why
shouldn't they do the same with Lisp?
Friedrich
Friedrich Dominicus
>
> Remember this is stuff that the person would like to give away ( it
> was clipped but I did say open source/free ). He wants it on both
> Windows and Linux ( and possibly other UNICES ) . That's $1800
> out of his pocket. Compare that to perl, python, ruby,gcc etc where
> you pay nothing.
Well he could use CMUCL couldn't he? Or CLISP or. Well he want to use a
cross-platform GUI-Toolkit. Well there is not much available for the
free Lisps, but it's part of the free verson of LispWorks. So he could
use the free version and distribute his code for free. If people want
to have it than they have to install LispWorks on their own. I can't
see why this should be more tedious than to install either python,
perl, ruby, gcc on Windows. Where's the difference? Why is it ok to
install everything else but a Lisp?
>
> The upshot of this is that a person who wants to write something and
> make it open source ( say he wants to write somethng that finds and
> indexs all his mp3s, since he goes to that trouble to write it for
> himself, he would like to make it open source ) is better off not
> using Lisp.
Well I really dislike such comments You can distribute as much
code written by you as you like -- from any language. If you own
VCC++, you have paid for it but obviously it is unimportant for most
of the people, they
buy that stuff on Windows and are not using GCC. Well again why
shouldn't they do the same with Lisp? Why is installing all
stuff. According to you it's ok to install Python, Ruby. But why not
the personal edition from LispWorks? I guess CAPI is at least as good
as any of the cross-platform toolkits for Python. But hey what a deal
it's not free..
Friedrich
Harvey J. Stein
> I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
> There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
> output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and Linux.
>
> My question: is there a free (or very cheap) lisp implementation which
> either has a build-in GUI or has an easy interface to Qt, GTK or
> something similar that runs under Linux and Win32.
gcl has a Tk & I think a GTk interface.
--
Harvey Stein
Bloomberg LP
hjs...@bloomberg.com
Jonathan Craven
hjs...@bloomberg.com (Harvey J. Stein) writes:
> jmur...@acm.org (Johann Murauer) writes:
>
> gcl has a Tk & I think a GTk interface.
But again, with the lisp2wish idea I mentioned above you don't really
NEED an implementation-specific interface (besides which last time I
checked gcl-tk was broken with newer Tk versions). It's quite easy to
get used to:
(format *wish*
"button .b1 -text {Click me} -command {puts lisp-foo}~%")
which would then run the function lisp-foo when clicked. (It's
criminal how little Tcl you actually have to learn to make your GUI.)
Or to wrap the thing up with something general like:
(defun make-button (name &optional callback &key (frame ".f1"))
"Sends a button constructor to wish, callback MUST be specified if
name is more than one word."
(when (null callback)
(setq callback name))
(format *wish*
"button ~a.b~A -text {~A} -command {set timedShow 0;puts ~A}~%"
frame callback name callback)
(format *wish* "pack ~a.b~a -side left~%" frame callback))
And I'm quite the newbie, again, so that may be a crude way to do it,
but if it works even for newbies, then that's a selling point. The
bigger selling point is you can use CLISP, CMUCL, Allegro, and
probably every other implementation as well since you're just sending
text to the windowing shell via FORMAT. And Tk exists on multiple
platforms as well and I think looks quite nice.
I suppose for a major project going this way would perhaps involve
re-inventing the wheel on things that CLIM already has implemented,
but in my small experience, if all you have in mind is putting up a
simple, nice GUI for your program it's the easiest way to do it.
-JC
<http://ww.telent.net/cliki/Graphics%20Toolkit> -- Lisp2wish.lisp
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/clslideshow/> -- a demonstration
<http://www.scriptics.com./man/tcl8.4/> -Tcl/Tk attempt at a hyperspec
Joel Ray Holveck
> Python, PHP or other scripting languages where the user of the program
> will have to install the interpreter to be able to use it. You can do
> the same thing with Common Lisp if you use one of the free (!)
> implementations like CMUCL, SBCL, ECL, OpenMCL, or CLISP. With CLISP
> alone you will be able to cover most Unix platforms (including Mac OS
> X), Linux, Windows, and even Amiga OS IIRC.
To be fair, most Lisp apps are not very easy for somebody to install
if they don't know what they're doing. Lisp delivery of small apps
still is something of a problem.
joelh
Rahul Jain
> To be fair, most Lisp apps are not very easy for somebody to install
> if they don't know what they're doing. Lisp delivery of small apps
> still is something of a problem.
Unless, of course, they use debian. :)
Now, instead of others complaining that common-lisp-controller only
works in debian, I think it might be better if someone actually made
c-l-c packages for other systems. Preferably systems they actually
use. That way you don't get debian users trying to make RPM packages
when they only installed Redhat to make these packages.
To summarize, PLEASE help port common-lisp-controller to platforms
other than debian. Redhat, Windows, and FreeBSD would be a good start.
--
-> -/- - Rahul Jain - -\- <-
-> -\- http://linux.rice.edu/~rahul -=- mailto:rj...@techie.com -/- <-
-> -/- "I never could get the hang of Thursdays." - HHGTTG by DNA -\- <-
|--|--------|--------------|----|-------------|------|---------|-----|-|
Version 11.423.999.221020101.23.50110101.042
(c)1996-2002, All rights reserved. Disclaimer available upon request.
Christopher Stacy
Joel> To be fair, most Lisp apps are not very easy for somebody to install
Joel> if they don't know what they're doing. Lisp delivery of small apps
Joel> still is something of a problem.
The last time I wanted to deliver a small Lisp app to someone (on Windows),
I simply emailed them a zip file containing the exectuable. (The zip file
also included a source directory, for reference, but they didn't have any
Lisp compiler available to them or anything.) To run the app, they clicked
on the email attachment, ran Winzip on it, and then clicked on app.EXE file.
What's the problem?
Florian Weimer
> The last time I wanted to deliver a small Lisp app to someone (on Windows),
> I simply emailed them a zip file containing the exectuable. (The zip file
> also included a source directory, for reference, but they didn't have any
> Lisp compiler available to them or anything.) To run the app, they clicked
> on the email attachment, ran Winzip on it, and then clicked on app.EXE file.
>
> What's the problem?
The free CL implementations do not support creating small executables,
I think.
Harvey J. Stein
> hjs...@bloomberg.com (Harvey J. Stein) writes:
>
> > jmur...@acm.org (Johann Murauer) writes:
> >
> > gcl has a Tk & I think a GTk interface.
>
> But again, with the lisp2wish idea I mentioned above you don't really
> NEED an implementation-specific interface (besides which last time I
> checked gcl-tk was broken with newer Tk versions). It's quite easy to
> get used to:
>
> (format *wish*
> "button .b1 -text {Click me} -command {puts lisp-foo}~%")
That's a low level interface. The lisps with graphics toolkits
integrated usually have a higher level, more lispish interface. In
STk you'd have:
(define b (make <button>
:text "Click me"
:action (lambda () (do-something in lisp environment))))
etc.
Marco Antoniotti
Rahul Jain <rj...@sid-1129.sid.rice.edu> writes:
> Joel Ray Holveck <jo...@juniper.net> writes:
>
> > To be fair, most Lisp apps are not very easy for somebody to install
> > if they don't know what they're doing. Lisp delivery of small apps
> > still is something of a problem.
>
> Unless, of course, they use debian. :)
>
> Now, instead of others complaining that common-lisp-controller only
> works in debian, I think it might be better if someone actually made
> c-l-c packages for other systems. Preferably systems they actually
> use. That way you don't get debian users trying to make RPM packages
> when they only installed Redhat to make these packages.
>
> To summarize, PLEASE help port common-lisp-controller to platforms
> other than debian. Redhat, Windows, and FreeBSD would be a good
> start.
For a CL only solution you can look at CL.CONFIGURATION (pardon the
shameless plug). It works in any CL under any OS (or it makes
provisions to) and makes installing a new package as easy as
cl-prompt> (load "package.conf")
#p"package.conf"
cl-prompt> (conf:setup "THE-PACKAGE")
"THE-PACKAGE"
cl-prompt> (mk:load-system "THE-PACKAGE")
Also, the intention is not to be limited to MK:DEFSYSTEM for the last
line.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ========================================================
NYU Courant Bioinformatics Group tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
719 Broadway 12th Floor fax +1 - 212 - 995 4122
New York, NY 10003, USA http://bioinformatics.cat.nyu.edu
"Hello New York! We'll do what we can!"
Bill Murray in `Ghostbusters'.
Marco Antoniotti
CL.CONFIGURATION can be found in the CLOCC.
Tim Bradshaw
> Remember this is stuff that the person would like to give away ( it
> was clipped but I did say open source/free ). He wants it on both
> Windows and Linux ( and possibly other UNICES ) . That's $1800
> out of his pocket. Compare that to perl, python, ruby,gcc etc where
> you pay nothing.
I was just correcting the error in the post.
Siegfried Gonzi
Does anybody know what Allegro Common Lisp actually costs (single user
license)? On slashdot I read something like: 60.000.- USD*. The poster
then has been corrected to 6.000.- USD. But even this sounds a little bit
way too high? Maybe this are the prices for a server-license?
I think the LispWorks prices are okay.
S. Gonzi
[I do not have got the ID number of the post; but I red it a few days
ago]
Friedrich Dominicus
>
> Does anybody know what Allegro Common Lisp actually costs (single user
> license)? On slashdot I read something like: 60.000.- USD*. The poster
> then has been corrected to 6.000.- USD. But even this sounds a little bit
> way too high? Maybe this are the prices for a server-license?
Why don't you ask Franz directly. They know better than anyoine else.
>
> I think the LispWorks prices are okay.
Well than buy LispWorks ;-)
Regards
Friedrich
Software Scavenger
> Does anybody know what Allegro Common Lisp actually costs (single user
When comparing prices of brands of Lisp, I would look at other factors
besides just the up-front price. I would especially want to know
which of the following would violate the terms of the license:
1. Buy it for my home computer and install it on my laptop too.
2. Release shareware and/or freeware executables.
3. Do demonstration projects on my own time to try to convince my
employer to use Lisp for future projects. (Could that be construed
as sharing the license illegally with my employer?)
Does anyone know the answers to the above for the major commercial
brands of Lisp such as Lispworks and Allegro? Or could someone post
the license text so it could be analyzed in the forum?
I think lack of knowledge of such issues might be one factor in why
Lisp is not used more than it is. People probably assume the license
terms are draconian, because the major Lisp vendors have a reputation
of not being very grassroots friendly. That reputation might actually
be the single biggest factor in keeping Lisp relatively obscure,
regardless of how closely the reputation matches reality.
Brian P Templeton
> jmur...@acm.org (Johann Murauer) writes:
>> My question: is there a free (or very cheap) lisp implementation which
>> either has a build-in GUI or has an easy interface to Qt, GTK or
>> something similar that runs under Linux and Win32.
> If Scheme counts as a LISP, then MzScheme, STk, and possibly other
> implementations (bigloo? MIT-Scheme?) have portable GUIs that work
> accross platforms (Linux, Win32, and perhaps also MacOS for some of them).
>
Yes, but do they work across implementations? (which would normally
ensure portability)
> Yours freely,
>
> [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
> [ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
> Tradition is the matter of which civilization is made.
> Anyone who rejects tradition per se should be left naked in a desert island.
> Innovation is the matter with which civilization is built.
> Anyone who rejects innovation per se should be left naked in a desert island.
--
BPT <b...@tunes.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail
Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail
Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
Thaddeus L Olczyk
<siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> wrote:
>
>Does anybody know what Allegro Common Lisp actually costs (single user
>license)? On slashdot I read something like: 60.000.- USD*. The poster
>then has been corrected to 6.000.- USD. But even this sounds a little bit
>way too high? Maybe this are the prices for a server-license?
I could not find prices on the web page. To me this is extraordinary
dumb. ( The reason that I don't use QNX is that they don't display
prices. ) It indicates that the prices are so onerous that they don't
dare put them on the site, and that they want you to engage ( like
two bucks engage in battle and wind up with there horns all tangled
together, hard to split up ) a salesperson who will try to convince
you against your better judgement to shell out big bucks, or charge
what the market will bear.
I don't see how the situation helps them at all.
Christopher Browne
It's a somewhat painful dilemma that is all too common.
-> If they publicize too-high prices on the web, that'll scare people
away that they might ultimately negotiate better pricing for.
(After all, while 1 copy might appropriately cost a bundle, an
organization buying 50 copies is worth dickering with.)
-> Does Franz want to deal with people not willing to pay a fairly
big price up front? Possibly not...
I seriously doubt that they are interested in the sort of dilution
of revenues that would result from pushing product through third
party channels. (Consider: It would be rather surprising if Red
Hat Software gets significantly more than $15 when a box with a $50
pricetag gets sold at CompUSA...)
Consider:
"Unless you're on the Forbes' richest 100 list, you're not a market,
just another photon in the rainbow."
-- Monty Brandenberg <mcb...@ne.mediaone.net>
This certainly doesn't apply _directly_ to companies like Franz, but
it still is suggestive of the sound principle: If you're not dropping
a reasonably important chunk of change into their lap, you're not of
economic importance.
From some perspectives, $6K USD isn't very much. I believe that the
guys at Imperial Software, of "Motif GUI Builder" fame used to charge
around $50K _per user_ for their software. (No royalty fees after
that, mind you... THERE would be insult to add to injury!)
But in short it's not obvious that cutting prices would be in Franz's
interests. It's not obvious at all.
- If they have customers ready to balk at high prices, and go
elsewhere, _THAT_ would be a good reason to cut prices.
- If they figured that by cutting the price in 6, that they would
gain 6x as many customers, _THAT_ would be a good reason to cut
prices to 1/6 the present levels. (If the number is $6k, that would
drop it to $1K, which would _still_ be daunting to anybody sitting
at the low end of the "price preference" scale.) But it is not at
all obvious that this would happen.
I might _wish_ that I could buy ACL for $200; I might even hold
tenaciously to a refusal to pay more than that. For the time being,
that's liable to lead to them not selling me a copy of ACL, and my not
paying them $200 for it. :-).
--
(concatenate 'string "aa454" "@freenet.carleton.ca")
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/spreadsheets.html
/"\
\ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN
X AGAINST HTML MAIL
/ \
Greg Menke
>
> -> Does Franz want to deal with people not willing to pay a fairly
> big price up front? Possibly not...
>
> I seriously doubt that they are interested in the sort of dilution
> of revenues that would result from pushing product through third
> party channels. (Consider: It would be rather surprising if Red
> Hat Software gets significantly more than $15 when a box with a $50
> pricetag gets sold at CompUSA...)
>
When I sat down to buy a Linux based commercial Lisp, I tried Franz
first; mostly because I recognized the name from ages ago. I
contacted their sales people, who gave me a local distributor to
contact, which I did. I never heard from Franz, or the distributor
again.
So, after a couple weeks, I got annoyed and looked again at Lispworks.
Xanalys has prices on their webpage and we were able to just go ahead
and buy a copy of Lispworks with no fuss or game playing. Just
recently we purchased the 4.2 upgrade and if I ever get a budget
again, we'll buy a copy of Lispworks Enterprise.
Perhaps Franz has a business arrangement where dealing with
individuals isn't profitable and they get their money out of some few
huge customers, but I wonder how many sales they end up losing just
from making it hard for people to give them money.
Gregm
Marc Spitzer
Well I also had some oddities with Franz's pricing. I had a project to
do that I wanted to use to, among other things learn CL with. I
called Franz and asked them how much a developer license and about a
dozen runtimes would cost. I never got a quote and when I spoke to
them on the phone, it was a presales engineer if I remember correctly,
I got the distinct impression that Franz was in the "wife business"
and not the "whore business", perhaps that was a poor choice of words
let me explain:
Wife business = I am in all of your business and I get half of your
stuff if we break off our arrangement.
Whore business = I pay for service, you deliver the service and you
leave. If I want/need more service I pay for it. Basically a
professional relationship.
And there was no way I would get anything that looked like a wife
through my boss to go to the lawyers.
I have no issue with Franz, it is there product and they can do
what they want with it and that includes pricing.
marc
Thomas F. Burdick
> On 17 Jan 2002 01:43:31 -0800, tfb+g...@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw)
> wrote:
>
> >olc...@interaccess.com (Thaddeus L Olczyk) wrote in message news:<3c46bd41...@nntp.interaccess.com>...
> >
> >> Producing freely distributed executables with both is ( my
> >> understanding ) highly problematic.
> >
> >For LispWorks at least this is not so for Windows and Linux: you can
> >generate freely distributable executables for both these platforms
> >from the commercial product (possibly with some constraints - there
> >may be stuff like CORBA or something you can't include). I think
> >there are royalties for the Unix platforms.
> >
> >--tim
> Well we begin with the subject-- the person was asking for *free*
> lisps. But lets just stop for a moment and assume that a person was
> willing to pay something.
Actually, the OP *was* willing to pay something "reasonable". Why do
you post shit like this?
> Remember this is stuff that the person would like to give away ( it
> was clipped but I did say open source/free ).
Yeah, and on Windows, this costs money. Like everything on Windows.
This is *not* a language issue. $1800 ain't cheap, but you get a lot
for them 1800. There's also Corman Lisp, which is cheap. Oh, wait,
the OP wants this on Linux *and* Windows? Fine, use CMUCL on Linux.
But extra-language libraries is gonna be a bit of a pain. That's
always the case with Unix-Windows portability.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Bijan Parsia
[snip]
> - If they have customers ready to balk at high prices, and go
> elsewhere, _THAT_ would be a good reason to cut prices.
>
> - If they figured that by cutting the price in 6, that they would
> gain 6x as many customers, _THAT_ would be a good reason to cut
> prices to 1/6 the present levels.
Actually, probably not. 6x the customers/sales can mean much more than 6x
the overhead (support, etc.). Plus, 6x the customers might mean quite a
bit less than 6x sales.
Over on comp.lang.smalltalk, the Cincom smalltalk product manager gave a
pretty brutal breakdown of their pricing dilemmas. It was
horrid. (Cincom's pricing tactis are much like Franz's, FWIW. VisualWorks,
their flagship Smalltalk, almost died at its prior company with a more
"acceptible" pricing model.)
> (If the number is $6k, that would
> drop it to $1K, which would _still_ be daunting to anybody sitting
> at the low end of the "price preference" scale.)
So you end up with the worst of both: No money, lots of people to support,
and all the complainers still complaining :)
> But it is not at
> all obvious that this would happen.
Yes, then *really* no money, more people to support, all the old
complainers complaining, and everyone else complaining that sucky Franz
management drove the company and the system into the dirt. woo hoo :)
> I might _wish_ that I could buy ACL for $200; I might even hold
> tenaciously to a refusal to pay more than that. For the time being,
> that's liable to lead to them not selling me a copy of ACL, and my not
> paying them $200 for it. :-).
One thing I've wondered aloud at over in c.l.smalltalk was if there was a
reasonable small developer sweet spot that wouldn't be too much
trouble. CodeWarrior had education pricing limitied to freeware and
shareware products. I can see a hobbyist market being a useful thing for
many implementers. Not sure about the super high end guys though...I mean,
would it help Franz to have a bazillion little hackers peddling Allegro
bases microutilities? Maybe, maybe not :)
Aside from shareware, there are quite a few of small time developers. One
fellow over on comp.lang.smalltalk develops medical billing software for
doctors (very specialized). He may have 10 customers and not a *huge*
amount of revenue. Langauges like common lisp or smalltalk can be ideal
for such one person, but tricky jobs. They *are* marginal operations,
though.
The trick is whether the price can be made worth it for Franz without
pissing off their real customers.
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
Siegfried Gonzi
> One thing I've wondered aloud at over in c.l.smalltalk was if there was a
> reasonable small developer sweet spot that wouldn't be too much
> trouble. CodeWarrior had education pricing limitied to freeware and
> shareware products.
For the Mac one can also buy Macintosh Common Lisp for a student price of
about USD 100.- (or therelike). I think he then gets the full version but
support and printed-manuals.
Normally every software vendor sells at least a low cost version of their
products. They sell it and nothing more, because a low cost version does not
include service/hotline/support. I would say it is not too much work for the
software vendor to sell a low cost copy to a student or individual.
The chicken egg problem: if Common Lisp is really that great concerning the
productivity of a programmer or development team why then should one pay
overgenerous prices for a hotline/support which should not happen very often;
otherwise: how can one beeing sure -beforehand- that the high single license
prices are worth the money and that a call for support will be not required
too often (due to the productivity of Lisp)?
But I have to mention that I do believe that it is not the fault of the
vendors that there are not more high quality Lisp versions for the PC platform
out there.
S. Gonzi
Lieven Marchand
> Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> wrote in message news:<3C493907...@kfunigraz.ac.at>...
>
> > Does anybody know what Allegro Common Lisp actually costs (single user
>
> When comparing prices of brands of Lisp, I would look at other factors
> besides just the up-front price. I would especially want to know
> which of the following would violate the terms of the license:
>
> 1. Buy it for my home computer and install it on my laptop too.
> 2. Release shareware and/or freeware executables.
> 3. Do demonstration projects on my own time to try to convince my
> employer to use Lisp for future projects. (Could that be construed
> as sharing the license illegally with my employer?)
>
> Does anyone know the answers to the above for the major commercial
> brands of Lisp such as Lispworks and Allegro? Or could someone post
> the license text so it could be analyzed in the forum?
>
You can get the license text for Xanalys Lispworks from the Personal
Edition. I'm not a lawyer and I do not speak for Xanalys but these are
quotes from the license text.
1. You may use the Software only on a single computer at a time.
2. Distribution of Runtimes. You may distribute Runtimes solely to
end-users as part of an application developed using the Software
("Application"), except that you may not distribute any part of the
Software as a general purpose Lisp development tool. Any Runtimes
distributed as part of the Application will continue to be subject to
the terms and conditions of this Agreement. You agree to license the
Application to your customers under a written license agreement
containing terms and conditions with regard to the Software and Runtimes
that are at least as restrictive as those contained herein.
For (3) I think you're OK as long as you abide by the rules stipulated
in 2.
--
Lieven Marchand <m...@wyrd.be>
She says, "Honey, you're a Bastard of great proportion."
He says, "Darling, I plead guilty to that sin."
Cowboy Junkies -- A few simple words
Tim Bradshaw
> Perhaps Franz has a business arrangement where dealing with
> individuals isn't profitable and they get their money out of some few
> huge customers, but I wonder how many sales they end up losing just
> from making it hard for people to give them money.
In Franz's defense (I am not a Franz customer), they did, some years
ago, sell a cheap (~ $1000 or maybe much less) Lisp for PCs (this was
pre linux being a major platform). I presume they stopped selling it
because it wasn't profitable. There are lots of models for selling
software, and not all of them are selling large numbers of licenses at
three-digit dollar prices. Oracle got rich selling licenses at probably
two orders of magnitude more than that (MS got even richer of
course selling enormous numbers of 3-digit licenses, which just goes
to show there are lots of places to live...)
--tim
Dr. Edmund Weitz
> Oracle got rich selling licenses at probably two orders of magnitude
> more than that
Yep, but you can download a _full_ version of Oracle to play with and
use it for development purposes without any restrictions as far as I
know. You'll only have to pay big bucks if you want to deploy your
application.
I'm not in a position to critize Franz or any other commercial Lisp
vendor, but I'm sure I'd love to have something similar from
them... :)
Edi.
Greg Menke
I've heard on a couple occasions that the Franz licenses are ~$3000 US
or so- its a lot of money, but I would have been willing to plunk it
down for a good tool. Their business practices are certainly their
affair of course...
Gregm
Pierre R. Mai
> * Greg Menke wrote:
>
> > Perhaps Franz has a business arrangement where dealing with
> > individuals isn't profitable and they get their money out of some few
> > huge customers, but I wonder how many sales they end up losing just
> > from making it hard for people to give them money.
>
> In Franz's defense (I am not a Franz customer), they did, some years
> ago, sell a cheap (~ $1000 or maybe much less) Lisp for PCs (this was
> pre linux being a major platform). I presume they stopped selling it
> because it wasn't profitable. There are lots of models for selling
FWIW the SRP of Allegro CL/PC was $995, and you could e.g. get a
discount of $200 with the voucher in the back of at least some
printings of Graham's On Lisp.
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre R. Mai <pm...@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
Coby Beck
"Greg Menke" <gregm...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:m3665wg...@europa.pienet...
>
> I've heard on a couple occasions that the Franz licenses are ~$3000 US
> or so- its a lot of money, but I would have been willing to plunk it
> down for a good tool. Their business practices are certainly their
> affair of course...
>
What makes Franz difficult to justify is their runtime fee policy. They wanted
a substantial percentage when my company made all the enquiries. It was way
off the mark for a development environment and application delivery.
--
Coby
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
Bijan Parsia
> Bijan Parsia wrote:
>
> > One thing I've wondered aloud at over in c.l.smalltalk was if there was a
> > reasonable small developer sweet spot that wouldn't be too much
> > trouble. CodeWarrior had education pricing limitied to freeware and
> > shareware products.
>
> For the Mac one can also buy Macintosh Common Lisp for a student price of
> about USD 100.- (or therelike). I think he then gets the full version but
> support and printed-manuals.
They may still be selling their "newstand" and "champion" editions.
*But*, they have a relatively cheap full price. The differnce between the
uber cheap and the full price is not so great.
> Normally every software vendor sells at least a low cost version of their
> products.
Well, depends on what you mean by normal. If you're small and your main
business is selling custom contracts to large corps (for the most part),
then not having a low cost version seems standard. That's working from a
sample of 3 or so :)
>They sell it and nothing more, because a low cost version does not
> include service/hotline/support. I would say it is not too much work for the
> software vendor to sell a low cost copy to a student or individual.
Well, you have to include marketing and sales handling, which might not be
too much, but also concerns from you're other customers about why the punk
kid gets it cheap.
It really seems to me doable, but I don't have access to all the details,
after all, so am hesitent to judge.
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
Bijan Parsia
> "Greg Menke" <gregm...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
> news:m3665wg...@europa.pienet...
> >
> > I've heard on a couple occasions that the Franz licenses are ~$3000 US
> > or so- its a lot of money, but I would have been willing to plunk it
> > down for a good tool. Their business practices are certainly their
> > affair of course...
>
> What makes Franz difficult to justify is their runtime fee policy.
> They wanted a substantial percentage when my company made all the
> enquiries. It was way off the mark for a development environment and
> application delivery.
FWIW, this is true for VisualWorks, Cincom's flagship Smalltalk. They also
want to audit your books and other, to me, insane things :)
However, they did save VisualWorks and have a very nice Non commercial
version (download and go, no licence key or whatnot), and contribute lots
to the community (source code, conference sponsership, etc. etc.)
I'd rather them have their weird (to me) pricing and do all this other
stuff than there be no VisualWorks.
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
Alain Picard
> You can get the license text for Xanalys Lispworks from the Personal
> Edition. I'm not a lawyer and I do not speak for Xanalys but these are
> quotes from the license text.
>
> 2. Distribution of Runtimes. You may distribute Runtimes solely to
And note further that as of 4.2, runtimes no longer exist for the PC
editions of Lispworks (i.e. on Linux and Windows). They still apply
on "real" (ahem) unices.
--
It would be difficult to construe Larry Wall, in article
this as a feature. <1995May29....@netlabs.com>
Software Scavenger
> FWIW, this is true for VisualWorks, Cincom's flagship Smalltalk. They also
> want to audit your books and other, to me, insane things :)
That's their business. Meanwhile Lispworks is a great product with
very good terms. Lisp is better than Smalltalk, so there's no real
reason to bother with Smalltalk at all. If Lispworks is not quite as
good as Franz Allegro technically, it's close enough that it doesn't
make any practical difference, especially if Franz's terms put Allegro
out of reach.
My advice to everyone facing such conflicts is to just get Lispworks
and get to work. If we want to use Lisp to reinvent the future, we
have to spend more time doing it and less time beating around the
bushes trying to decide what to do.
The real, important, fundamental, profound questions to ask yourself
are these:
1. Do you have Lispworks yet?
2. Have you used it yet, to reinvent the future?
3. If not, why not?
Espen Vestre
> If Lispworks is not quite as good as Franz Allegro technically
my impression is that YMMV, that it's difficult to rank the two
products. They're both _very_ good systems, and both companies give
excellent support.
--
(espen)
Johann Murauer
<jona...@craven.mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>
>hjs...@bloomberg.com (Harvey J. Stein) writes:
>
>> jmur...@acm.org (Johann Murauer) writes:
>>
>> gcl has a Tk & I think a GTk interface.
>
>But again, with the lisp2wish idea I mentioned above you don't really
>NEED an implementation-specific interface (besides which last time I
>checked gcl-tk was broken with newer Tk versions). It's quite easy to
>get used to:
>
>(format *wish*
> "button .b1 -text {Click me} -command {puts lisp-foo}~%")
>
>which would then run the function lisp-foo when clicked. (It's
>criminal how little Tcl you actually have to learn to make your GUI.)
>Or to wrap the thing up with something general like:
>
>(defun make-button (name &optional callback &key (frame ".f1"))
> "Sends a button constructor to wish, callback MUST be specified if
> name is more than one word."
> (when (null callback)
> (setq callback name))
> (format *wish*
> "button ~a.b~A -text {~A} -command {set timedShow 0;puts ~A}~%"
> frame callback name callback)
> (format *wish* "pack ~a.b~a -side left~%" frame callback))
>
>And I'm quite the newbie, again, so that may be a crude way to do it,
>but if it works even for newbies, then that's a selling point. The
>bigger selling point is you can use CLISP, CMUCL, Allegro, and
>probably every other implementation as well since you're just sending
>text to the windowing shell via FORMAT. And Tk exists on multiple
>platforms as well and I think looks quite nice.
>
>I suppose for a major project going this way would perhaps involve
>re-inventing the wheel on things that CLIM already has implemented,
>but in my small experience, if all you have in mind is putting up a
>simple, nice GUI for your program it's the easiest way to do it.
>
>-JC
>
><http://ww.telent.net/cliki/Graphics%20Toolkit> -- Lisp2wish.lisp
><https://sourceforge.net/projects/clslideshow/> -- a demonstration
><http://www.scriptics.com./man/tcl8.4/> -Tcl/Tk attempt at a hyperspec
Hi,
(it's that basic that I think I should not pollute the list. And I am
a very bloody beginner ....)
I want to you CLISP and wish83 on Windows XP
#1: I installed CLISP2.27 --- seems to be okay
#2: I installed wish83 --- seems also akay
#3: In CLISP I loaded (load "lisp2wish.lisp") --- also okay
When I tried
(TEST-WISH)
I get
*** - EVAL: the function WISH::RUN-PROGRAM is undefined
Also
(format *wish* "button .b1 -text {click.me} -command {exit}")
does not work
I tried it in different ways: first with running wish before I
loaded lisp2wish, second I loaded lisp2wish and then started
wish --- nothing help.
BTW: what about a "pack .b1", not needed?
It would be great if you could point me to my error and give me
the most simple "Hello started tutorial".
Many thanks,
Johann Murauer
synthespian
> Joel Ray Holveck <jo...@juniper.net> writes:
>
>> To be fair, most Lisp apps are not very easy for somebody to install
>> if they don't know what they're doing. Lisp delivery of small apps
>> still is something of a problem.
>
> Unless, of course, they use debian. :)
>
> Now, instead of others complaining that common-lisp-controller only
> works in debian, I think it might be better if someone actually made
> c-l-c packages for other systems. Preferably systems they actually
> use. That way you don't get debian users trying to make RPM packages
> when they only installed Redhat to make these packages.
>
> To summarize, PLEASE help port common-lisp-controller to platforms
> other than debian. Redhat, Windows, and FreeBSD would be a good start.
>
Hi-
What's the common-lisp-controller? What is it for?
Where is it in Debian (my distro)?
TIA
Regs,
synthespian
synthespian
> Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> wrote in message news:<3C493907...@kfunigraz.ac.at>...
> terms are draconian, because the major Lisp vendors have a reputation
> of not being very grassroots friendly. That reputation might actually
> be the single biggest factor in keeping Lisp relatively obscure,
> regardless of how closely the reputation matches reality.
Hi-
You bet!
And in c-l-l you get to read Lispers who are very confortable with the outrageous prices commercial lisps charge!
Price is a __key__ factor! For the student, for the mathematician in a developing nation, for the newbie (who one day may turn out to be a guru).
Seems to me a lot of lispers here don't even grasp the meaning and importance of "GPL".
And, with such a great language, born in 1958, it's no wonder it hasn't beaten the likes of C/C++...There doesn't seem to be a community that's really interested in open-source politics.
Regs,
synthespian
Wade Humeniuk
"Software Scavenger" <cubic...@mailandnews.com> wrote in message
news:a6789134.02012...@posting.google.com...
> Bijan Parsia <bpa...@email.unc.edu> wrote in message
news:<Pine.A41.4.21L1.02012...@login8.isis.unc.edu>...
> and get to work. If we want to use Lisp to reinvent the future, we
> have to spend more time doing it and less time beating around the
> bushes trying to decide what to do.
>
> The real, important, fundamental, profound questions to ask yourself
> are these:
>
> 1. Do you have Lispworks yet?
> 2. Have you used it yet, to reinvent the future?
> 3. If not, why not?
I agree. I have had LWW Professional for about 4 years. It is a perfectly
capable system. It has some short-comings, but what development environment
doesn't? I just accept its limitations and move on from there. It will get
there, but people have to use it.
Wade
Thom Goodsell
>
> Hi-
>
> You bet!
> And in c-l-l you get to read Lispers who are very confortable with the outrageous prices commercial lisps charge!
> Price is a __key__ factor! For the student, for the mathematician in a developing nation, for the newbie (who one day may turn out to be a guru).
> Seems to me a lot of lispers here don't even grasp the meaning and importance of "GPL".
> And, with such a great language, born in 1958, it's no wonder it hasn't beaten the likes of C/C++...There doesn't seem to be a community that's really interested in open-source politics.
> Regs,
> synthespian
>
Bom dia,
You must be new to this newsgroup if you think there's no CL community
interested in open-source politics. Either that, or you haven't been
reading very closely. There are quite a few people interested in open
source CL, and you can get (at least) two fine implementations that
are open source: CMUCL and CLISP.
What you won't see in this newsgroup is consistent politics. Some
people here are radically pro-GPL, some are radically
pro-commercial-software. Most are somewhere in the middle, and they
have well thought-out reasons for their opinions.
If you're interested in open-source CL resources, though, you should
check out CLiki: http://ww.telent.net/cliki/index
Thom
--
(let ((e-mail-address "Z...@IXG.IUS")) (loop with new-string =
(make-string (length e-mail-address)) for count from 0 to (1- (length
e-mail-address)) for char-code = (char-code (aref e-mail-address
count)) for new-char-code = (if (and (> char-code 64) (< char-code
123)) (+ (mod (+ 13 char-code) 52) 65) char-code) do (setf (aref
new-string count) (code-char new-char-code)) finally (return
new-string)))
synthespian
> * Greg Menke wrote:
>
>> Perhaps Franz has a business arrangement where dealing with
>> individuals isn't profitable and they get their money out of some few
>> huge customers, but I wonder how many sales they end up losing just
>> from making it hard for people to give them money.
>
> In Franz's defense (I am not a Franz customer), they did, some years
> ago, sell a cheap (~ $1000 or maybe much less) Lisp for PCs (this was
> pre linux being a major platform).
You're out of your mind!
You're probably an American, snug in your confortable Suburbia home, out of contact with the whole f*****g planet!
Do you know just __how much__ $1000 is in Venezuela? Russia? India? It's __not__ cheap!
That f*****g alienated mentality, I guess, explains why commercial Lisp is years ahead of free-software lisp (which, as I see often here in c.l.l. is regarded as something for the sorry fellows who don't have a thousand bucks to spend).
If there were more programmers like that, we wouldn't have GNU/Linux, GCC, C, C++, Perl , Python, etc.
So you see, the problem with LISP is not so much the __language__, but lack of involvement in the community with developing free software, while they just remain seated waiting for Franz or whatever to deliver them their next fix.
Hey, you don't watch world news on TV, do you?
Regs,
(and it's __not__ personal, ok? You just represent a certain mind set, that's all...)
synthespian
> --tim
Friedrich Dominicus
> In article <ey3vgdx...@cley.com>, Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> wrote:
> > * Greg Menke wrote:
> >
> >> Perhaps Franz has a business arrangement where dealing with
> >> individuals isn't profitable and they get their money out of some few
> >> huge customers, but I wonder how many sales they end up losing just
> >> from making it hard for people to give them money.
> >
> > In Franz's defense (I am not a Franz customer), they did, some years
> > ago, sell a cheap (~ $1000 or maybe much less) Lisp for PCs (this was
> > pre linux being a major platform).
>
> You're out of your mind!
Well I doubt the OP is, but you are definitly.
> You're probably an American, snug in your confortable Suburbia home, out of contact with the whole f*****g planet!
> Do you know just __how much__ $1000 is in Venezuela? Russia?
>India? It's __not__ cheap!
Wow how much does a VW Beatle cost wow $10000, you have no idea on how
much that is there or there of there.
> That f*****g alienated mentality, I guess, explains why commercial
> Lisp is years ahead of free-software lisp (which, as I see often here
> in c.l.l. is regarded as something for the sorry fellows who don't
> have a thousand bucks to spend).
Well how much is Borlands software stuff for Professionals? How much
for IBMs software how much for SAP. Does that harm in anyway the
success of their products? Well of course a Lisp must be free
obviously.
> If there were more programmers like that, we wouldn't have
> GNU/Linux, GCC, C, C++, Perl , Python, etc.
Well there are more Lisp implementations available than from any other
language, there are at least CMUCL and CLISP and ECLS which try to be
ANSI-Commoin Lisp what do you want more. Well maybe there are not
fancy GUIS available well but ther is CormanLisp and LispWorks
available which are both reasonable priced software pieces. So check
the facts before starting flames.
Friedrich
Thom Goodsell
the benefit of the doubt, here.
Tim is most definitely not out of his mind, and I suspect that he's
got a good (though probably not precise) idea of how much $1000 is in
Venezuela, Russia, India, and Brazil. The problem is that developing
good software, like that sold by Franz, requires a considerable amount
of time. Now, since most developers want to be paid, that requires
money. Since Franz develops software in the U.S., where the cost of
living is relatively high, it actually requires a lot of
money. Consequently, Franz charges money for their products. Their
prices are set the way they are because it keeps them in business.
Now, if someone in India wants to develop a Common Lisp environment
at India rates and price it to be attractive in India, Russia,
Venezuela, and Pakistan, they're more than welcome to do so. If it's a
quality product it will also find buyers in North America and Europe,
since it will cost less than the U.S.-built competitors.
Similarly, anyone who already _has_ the money they want can spend time
(or money) to improve the free CLs that are available. CMUCL is a very
good product that lacks only a few things to be a truly "industrial
strength" implementation; if you know someone whose economic needs
have already been met, please have them contribute to it. Maybe you
could even start a non-profit to work on it. That would certainly seem
appropriate, since you imply that writing free software is a
humanitarian project.
At any rate, bitching on c.l.l isn't going to solve the problem. If
you don't believe me, try searching google for all the times this has
come up in the past. And good luck with CMUCL or CLISP--there really
are a lot of people quietly working on improving those
implementations.
Regards,
Thom
P.S. The next time you attack on mindset and then claim it's nothing
personal, please refrain from the ad hominem attacks.
synthespian <synth...@uol.com.br> writes:
>
> You're out of your mind!
> You're probably an American, snug in your confortable Suburbia home, out of contact with the whole f*****g planet!
> Do you know just __how much__ $1000 is in Venezuela? Russia? India? It's __not__ cheap!
> That f*****g alienated mentality, I guess, explains why commercial Lisp is years ahead of free-software lisp (which, as I see often here in c.l.l. is regarded as something for the sorry fellows who don't have a thousand bucks to spend).
> If there were more programmers like that, we wouldn't have GNU/Linux, GCC, C, C++, Perl , Python, etc.
> So you see, the problem with LISP is not so much the __language__, but lack of involvement in the community with developing free software, while they just remain seated waiting for Franz or whatever to deliver them their next fix.
> Hey, you don't watch world news on TV, do you?
>
> Regs,
> (and it's __not__ personal, ok? You just represent a certain mind set, that's all...)
> synthespian
>
>
>
> > --tim
>
>
--
Siegfried Gonzi
> > In Franz's defense (I am not a Franz customer), they did, some years
> > ago, sell a cheap (~ $1000 or maybe much less) Lisp for PCs (this was
> > pre linux being a major platform).
>
> You're out of your mind!
> You're probably an American, snug in your confortable Suburbia home, out of contact with the whole f*****g planet!
> Do you know just __how much__ $1000 is in Venezuela? Russia? India? It's __not__ cheap!
This is really a very high price in this aereas (and nobody should wonder when they foster software-piracy then). And sometimes it is even much more worse, because the local dealer in this places gets an extra amount of money for distributing the
software in his country; that means (under some worse cases) USD 1000.- sums up to USD 2000.-.
I personally would not mind if the prices of a copy would only costs lets say USD 100.- in this countries; even we in the West would have to pay USD 1000.-
S. Gonzi
Resty Cena
> Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:
>
> > Oracle got rich selling licenses at probably two orders of magnitude
> > more than that
>
> Yep, but you can download a _full_ version of Oracle to play with and
> use it for development purposes without any restrictions as far as I
> know. You'll only have to pay big bucks if you want to deploy your
> application.
>
were using something else before, but when we saw the writing on the
wall on that product, we downloaded the Oracle RDBMS and Oracle/2000.
That wouldn't have happened if we had to pay the big bucks upfront.
Oracle Developer then became our standard.
I think that the FULL Lisps commercial development systems should be
freely downloadable, but disable deployment. It's true both Franz and
XAnalys will send you the full enterprise versions for evaluation, if
you take that extra step, but that's an extra step. Lisp isn't always
the first alternative choice for many to want to take that extra
negotiation to *officially* evaluate the product. I feel obligated to
write-up reasons for rejection in some professional looking format
(many programmers don't want to do that kind of writing). So then the
next big version of the product comes along and I think maybe this is
it, but how can I now face the same salesperson and ask for the
enterprise edition?
rmc
Tim Bradshaw
> You're out of your mind!
> You're probably an American, snug in your confortable Suburbia
> home, out of contact with the whole f*****g planet!
Well, no, I'm not, sorry to disappoint you.
> Do you know just __how much__ $1000 is in Venezuela? Russia?
> India? It's __not__ cheap!
Yes, I do know. I also understand some economics unlike you,
obviously.
> So you see, the problem with LISP is not so much the
> __language__, but lack of involvement in the community with
> developing free software, while they just remain seated
> waiting for Franz or whatever to deliver them their next fix.
Right, and fools like you whining away really helps this situation
doesn't it? Perhaps you should go away and contribute some free
software, like I have?
> Hey, you don't watch world news on TV, do you?
Actually I generally listen to the wireless, my TV is kind of worn
out, and the wireless news is generally better quality anyway.
--tim
Marco Antoniotti
synthespian <synth...@uol.com.br> writes:
> In article <ey3vgdx...@cley.com>, Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> wrote:
> > * Greg Menke wrote:
> >
> >> Perhaps Franz has a business arrangement where dealing with
> >> individuals isn't profitable and they get their money out of some few
> >> huge customers, but I wonder how many sales they end up losing just
> >> from making it hard for people to give them money.
> >
> > In Franz's defense (I am not a Franz customer), they did, some years
> > ago, sell a cheap (~ $1000 or maybe much less) Lisp for PCs (this was
> > pre linux being a major platform).
>
> You're out of your mind!
> You're probably an American, snug in your confortable Suburbia home, out of contact with the whole f*****g planet!
And you use a news posting software that is not capable of folding
lines at 78 characters. That is to say... you are not using GNUS on
Emacs.
> Do you know just __how much__ $1000 is in Venezuela? Russia? India? It's __not__ cheap!
> That f*****g alienated mentality, I guess, explains why commercial Lisp is years ahead of free-software lisp (which, as I see often here in c.l.l. is regarded as something for the sorry fellows who don't have a thousand bucks to spend).
> If there were more programmers like that, we wouldn't have
> GNU/Linux, GCC, C, C++, Perl , Python, etc.
GNU/Linux is coming out of some suburb of Boston and some suburb in
Scandinavia. Not bad for a product of rich-world living conditions.
> So you see, the problem with LISP is not so much the __language__, but lack of involvement in the community with developing free software, while they just remain seated waiting for Franz or whatever to deliver them their next fix.
> Hey, you don't watch world news on TV, do you?
And you do not know how to look for resources and seem to talk like a
troll who does not know what he is talking about.
>
> Regs,
> (and it's __not__ personal, ok? You just represent a certain
> mind set, that's all...)
... and you seem to represent the mindset of the bozos who went to
Genova and set the city on fire, falling in the trap set for them by
the real bad guys, who, incidentally, control most of the world media
*you* do not seem to understand.
Go away troll, and come back when you can claim to be at my left
(living in Brazil, does not make you automatically a good
guy. Remember Spain 82!)
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ========================================================
NYU Courant Bioinformatics Group tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
719 Broadway 12th Floor fax +1 - 212 - 995 4122
New York, NY 10003, USA http://bioinformatics.cat.nyu.edu
"Hello New York! We'll do what we can!"
Bill Murray in `Ghostbusters'.
Siegfried Gonzi
>
> > If there were more programmers like that, we wouldn't have
> > GNU/Linux, GCC, C, C++, Perl , Python, etc.
> Well there are more Lisp implementations available than from any other
> language, there are at least CMUCL and CLISP and ECLS which try to be
> ANSI-Commoin Lisp what do you want more.
If the case he wants to start a business based on Lisp programming? I personally would never start this business based on
CMUCL or CLISP (I do not know ECLS).
And a software developer-company in a Third-World country does not automatically make more money than the rest in this
specific country (except the main company is in the US or Europe and tries to develop software in a country where the wages
are ridiculous low).
> Well maybe there are not
> fancy GUIS available well but ther is CormanLisp and LispWorks
> available which are both reasonable priced software pieces. So check
> the facts before starting flames.
Even in Europe we would say USD 1000.- are not that cheap (assuming the average wages in a contry are about USD 1700.- netto).
What should one think when he earns maybe USD 200,. per month when he has to buy a software product which actually costs USD
1000.-.
S. Gonzi
Crusty
Try newLISP
http://www.nuevatec.com/
http://welcome.to/newlisp
It's easy enough for ME to use!
Johann Murauer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think about using lisp for a new project (purely non-commericial).
> There is a need for a GUI (Buttons, Listboxes, scrollbars, grahical
> output, ...) and it should run under Win32 (NT / XP / 2000) and Linux.
>
> My question: is there a free (or very cheap) lisp implementation which
> either has a build-in GUI or has an easy interface to Qt, GTK or
> something similar that runs under Linux and Win32.
>
> (If not I have to do the programming in C++, but maybe I could run
> some subporcesses in Lisp which will do the logical operations. Is
> this possible ?)
>
> May thanks and best regards,
> Johann Murauer
> jmur...@acm.org
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> free-software lisp (which, as I see often here in c.l.l. is regarded
> as something for the sorry fellows who don't have a thousand bucks to spend).
For the record, CLISP (GPL) has been used for developing a successful
e-commerce site whose owning company was worth more than 50M$, and CMU CL
(public domain) was also used for an important commercial airline
reservation system.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://web.mclink.it/amoroso/ency/README
[http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/]
Tim Bradshaw
> If the case he wants to start a business based on Lisp programming?
> I personally would never start this business based on CMUCL or CLISP
> (I do not know ECLS).
viaweb used clisp.
--tim
Fernando Rodríguez
wrote:
>In article <a6789134.02011...@posting.google.com>, cubic...@mailandnews.com (Software Scavenger) wrote:
>> Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> wrote in message news:<3C493907...@kfunigraz.ac.at>...
>> People probably assume the license
>> terms are draconian, because the major Lisp vendors have a reputation
>> of not being very grassroots friendly. That reputation might actually
>> be the single biggest factor in keeping Lisp relatively obscure,
>> regardless of how closely the reputation matches reality.
>
> Hi-
>
> You bet!
> And in c-l-l you get to read Lispers who are very confortable with the outrageous prices commercial lisps charge!
Please go to Xanalys's site and tell me what's outrageous about their prices
or draconian about their runtime-free license. Same thing for MCL and Corman
Lisp.
> Price is a __key__ factor!
Certainly.
> Seems to me a lot of lispers here don't even grasp the meaning and importance of "GPL".
Ever heard of CMUCL, Clisp or SBCL?
There's only 1 vendor which has 'peculiar' prices and licenses. All other are
not only competitive, but unexpensive.
--
Fernando Rodríguez
frr at wanadoo dot es
--
Thaddeus L Olczyk
wrote:
>Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:
>
>> Oracle got rich selling licenses at probably two orders of magnitude
>> more than that
>
>Yep, but you can download a _full_ version of Oracle to play with and
>use it for development purposes without any restrictions as far as I
>know. You'll only have to pay big bucks if you want to deploy your
>application.
>
>I'm not in a position to critize Franz or any other commercial Lisp
>vendor, but I'm sure I'd love to have something similar from
>them... :)
>
>Edi.
And even though you can download a version of Oracle, you need it less
then a version of Lisp. Every DB programmer knows the fundamentals of
Oracle ie SQL. It's just a matter of learning the platform specific
stuff, but many can get by just by learning how to pass queries, so
that's only one thing. ( On top of that most use ODBC, so they don't
have to learn much Oracle anyway. )
Consider a small program I just wrote. It descends a directory and
extracts all the filename extensions. Now it used car, cdr mapc and
a few other basic "lispisms". But it also uses regular expression
matching, string maniplation, file system examination. The funiest
was that I had no idea if there was a function that told me if
something was already in a list. ( I settled on using pushnew. )
The point is that someone who read Touretsky or Winston and Horn
might say that it looks like a Lisp program, but they would never have
been able to write it. For some stupid reason, the writers of Lisp
books do not believe Lisp programmers need to be able to write "real
applications". Why do I think this? Because they don't teach it.
So, Take someone who learned from these books. Further he's a
profesional programmer from other languages. Compare him to some guy
who has wants to learn another language. Being a proffesional
programmer, he feals reading the book puts him a long way toward
knowing the language. Especially since "he's been there before".
So now the programmer gets laid off and is looking for a new job.
Programmer1 says, "Even though I would like to get a job where I
can use Lisp. It would basically be entry level, and I would have to
get paid significantly less." Programmer2 says, "I would like to get
a job doing Language X. I've read a lot about it. Have played with it
at home a little bit. And now I'm ready to take it on in a job. Yes,
I'm not as profficient in it as I am in TheLanguageIUsedBefore, but
mmy general programming skills should carry the day. I won't have to
take a large paycut."
Paycut aside this is also the perspective of managers. When C ruled
and C++ started to take over, managers told prospective employees
who were profficient at C but not at C++, "Don't worry, if you know
C, then C++ is easy." When C++ ruled and Java took over managers said,
"Don't worry, if you know C++, then Java is easy."
They don't say things like this about Lisp. So before a person can
apply for a Lisp job, they are going to have to invest time in really
learning Lisp. And if the Lisp community wants people to acquire
skills in Lisp, they are going to have to supply a
"free-for-non-commercial-use ( including delivering open source
executables ) Lisp that runs on both Windows and Linux ( at least,
a generic Unix wold be better ) and comes with an industrial strength
GUI ( please don't say TK, but GTK 2.0 might be doable when it finally
comes out )."
I expect many here to say that I am out of touch with reality, that
commercial companies can't do this. ( BTW that is what they used to
say about Chicago Rapid Transit. They don't have the money to clean
it up and keep fares cheap. Eventually they manged to find the money.
Now a decaying system has been restored. ) But here is the reality.
1) Without such an implementation the base of Lisp programmers will
not expand very fast.
2) Without an expanding base of Lisp programmers, managers will be
hesitant to use Lisp.
3) Without an expanding base of usage, managers will worry about
vendors going out of business. So that mangers will be even less
likely to use it.
4) Without an expanding base of jobs, programmers will be less likely
to want to learn Lisp.
5) If this cycle keeps going then Lisp will die.
Oh yes. One more fact.
6) Supporters of other programming languages somehow manage to
survive without all the problems that Lisp interpretations have.
Nils Goesche
> Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
>
>> Well there are more Lisp implementations available than from any other
>> language, there are at least CMUCL and CLISP and ECLS which try to be
>> ANSI-Commoin Lisp what do you want more.
>
> If the case he wants to start a business based on Lisp programming? I
> personally would never start this business based on CMUCL or CLISP
> (I do not know ECLS).
Why not? I have used CMUCL a lot and there is nothing wrong with it
AFAICT.
Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."
PGP key ID 0x42B32FC9
Christopher Stacy
Thaddeus> So before a person can apply for a Lisp job, they are going
Thaddeus> to have to invest time in really learning Lisp. And if the
Thaddeus> Lisp community wants people to acquire skills in Lisp, they
Thaddeus> are going to have to supply a "free-for-non-commercial-use
Thaddeus> ( including delivering open source executables ) Lisp that
Thaddeus> runs on both Windows and Linux ( at least, a generic Unix
Thaddeus> wold be better ) and comes with an industrial strength GUI
Thaddeus> ( please don't say TK, but GTK 2.0 might be doable when it
Thaddeus> finally comes out )."
As is repeated about four or five messages on this newsgroup,
and documented all over the place: you can get numerous free
implementations of Lisp, including full-blown development
environments that run on Windows and Unix with several GUI kits.
Pierre R. Mai
> If the case he wants to start a business based on Lisp programming?
> I personally would never start this business based on CMUCL or CLISP
> (I do not know ECLS).
I cannot argue against your personal convictions, but I can point out
that there are others who have based (parts of) their businesses on
e.g. CMU CL. As just one case in point[1], CMU CL currently is a
mainstay of our own business (large-scale industrial ERP/SCM
server-based simulations and related tools), and I have no trouble
sleeping at night.
Of course 98% of our code-base is pure ANSI CL (+ some MOP stuff),
with only a couple of thousand LoC that are really implementation
dependent, e.g. command-line processing, some parts of our secure code
updating service, some lowest level socket code, database interfaces,
etc.
In a pinch, moving to another implementation will take at most a
couple of weeks, probably less. We take great care to keep as much
code as is reasonable portable to the main implementations that are
relevant to our problem domain.
Of course CMU CL is probably not going to be your implementation of
choice when it comes to implementing GUI frontends on Windows, but for
lots of other application areas, CMU CL can be a good fit indeed.
Cudos to the legions of CMU CL/Spice Lisp developers and maintainers
over the years for producing very high quality code, which provides a
very stable base for our products[2].
Regs, Pierre.
Footnotes:
[1] For other examples, see ITA Software, and several other companies
that have posted to the CMU CL mailing-lists in the past.
[2] Disclaimer: I'm currently doing my very small bit at helping
maintain CMU CL, so obviously I'm not including myself in that
paragraph... ;)
--
Pierre R. Mai <pm...@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
Sam Steingold
> * On the subject of "Re: Free Lisp with GUI"
> * Sent on Mon, 21 Jan 2002 17:58:23 +0100
> * Honorable Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> writes:
>
> I personally would never start this business based on
> CMUCL or CLISP (I do not know ECLS).
ITA Software runs on CMUCL and makes money.
Paul Graham made $50mln on CLISP (viaweb --> yahoo store)
Flashy GUI IDE's are not everything.
It might be that the (falsely perceived) lack of flashy GUI IDE, in a
certain perverse way, benefits CL by keeping away people who do not
understand that...
"... a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to
perform operations, but rather ... it is a novel formal medium for
expressing ideas about methodology"
Abelson/Sussman "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs".
--
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds)
Keep Jerusalem united! <http://www.onejerusalem.org/Petition.asp>
Read, think and remember! <http://www.iris.org.il> <http://www.memri.org/>
"Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." -Alan Perlis
Kenny Tilton
Sam Steingold wrote:
>
> > * In message <3C4C48AF...@kfunigraz.ac.at>
> > * On the subject of "Re: Free Lisp with GUI"
> > * Sent on Mon, 21 Jan 2002 17:58:23 +0100
> > * Honorable Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> writes:
> >
> > I personally would never start this business based on
> > CMUCL or CLISP (I do not know ECLS).
>
> ITA Software runs on CMUCL and makes money.
CMUCL or ACL?
From Franz:
http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml
"ITA Software selected Allegro CL as their development environment, and
they currently run it on several different platforms. "We use Lisp for
the high level structure, in conjunction with a variety of other
languages such as C and Java throughout the application." Explains
Wertheimer. "We've been pleased with Allegro CL's strong foreign
function interfaces, powerful compiler, and multi-platform support." He
adds."
Kenny
clinisys
Tim Bradshaw
> Consider a small program I just wrote. It descends a directory and
> extracts all the filename extensions. Now it used car, cdr mapc and
> a few other basic "lispisms". But it also uses regular expression
> matching, string maniplation, file system examination. The funiest
> was that I had no idea if there was a function that told me if
> something was already in a list. ( I settled on using pushnew. )
Really? Can you say why it does all this hair?
I'd say the following. Given two functions:
DIRECTORY-DIRECTORIES d -> subdirs of d
DIRECTORY-FILES d -> files in d
(and making mild assumptions about the tree structure of the
filesystem, which probably come down to ignoring symlinks), you can
write this algorithm without any of this weird stuff you seem to need.
(defun unique-extensions (root)
(let ((extensions '())) ;might want a hashtable or something
(labels ((do-one-dir (d)
(dolist (file (directory-files d))
(let ((type (pathname-type file)))
(when type
(pushnew type extensions :test #'string=))))
(dolist (sub (directory-directories d))
(do-one-dir sub))))
(do-one-dir root)
extensions)))
the two DIRECTORY-* functions are not completely portable, true. But
their implementation is not likely to involve huge complexity with
regexps or anything.
Indeed I'm in the process of writing a system which does really a lot
of filename bashing in CL and these two functions, as well as a couple
of others to canonicalise user input and output are almost all I need.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw
> Why not? I have used CMUCL a lot and there is nothing wrong with it
> AFAICT.
Well, it would bring up the inconvenient truth that there are multiple
high-quality zero-cost-to-use CL implementations and thus destroy the
thesis that Lisp is dying because you can't get a cheap implementation
and people like me don't care about this because we're all arrogant
Americans (I mean, come on, with a name like Nils with a second name
that almost certainly has an umlauted-o in it, and an email address
that ends in .de you're *bound* to be an American, obviously). It
wouldn't do to let facts get in the way of a nice rant about Lisp
being dead and Lisp hackers all being American suburban morons, would
it?
Of course Lisp is dead, has been since at least the mid 80s.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw
> Flashy GUI IDE's are not everything.
Does perl have a flashy GUI IDE? if it does do 98% of people writing
perl use it or emacs/vi and xterm?
Hmmm.
--tim
Raymond Toy
Pierre> Cudos to the legions of CMU CL/Spice Lisp developers and maintainers
Pierre> over the years for producing very high quality code, which provides a
Pierre> very stable base for our products[2].
Pierre> Regs, Pierre.
Pierre> Footnotes:
Pierre> [1] For other examples, see ITA Software, and several other companies
Pierre> that have posted to the CMU CL mailing-lists in the past.
Pierre> [2] Disclaimer: I'm currently doing my very small bit at helping
Pierre> maintain CMU CL, so obviously I'm not including myself in that
Pierre> paragraph... ;)
But you should, because you have done a good job at tracking down
bugs, fixing things, improving things. Certainly no less than any of
the other current CMUCL developers.
Ray
Pierre R. Mai
> Sam Steingold wrote:
> >
> > > * In message <3C4C48AF...@kfunigraz.ac.at>
> > > * On the subject of "Re: Free Lisp with GUI"
> > > * Sent on Mon, 21 Jan 2002 17:58:23 +0100
> > > * Honorable Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> writes:
> > >
> > > I personally would never start this business based on
> > > CMUCL or CLISP (I do not know ECLS).
> >
> > ITA Software runs on CMUCL and makes money.
>
> CMUCL or ACL?
From the posting on Graham's website, it seems they are using both.
Regs, Pierre.
Thomas F. Burdick
> Bijan Parsia <bpa...@email.unc.edu> wrote in message news:<Pine.A41.4.21L1.02012...@login8.isis.unc.edu>...
>
> > FWIW, this is true for VisualWorks, Cincom's flagship Smalltalk. They also
> > want to audit your books and other, to me, insane things :)
>
> That's their business. Meanwhile Lispworks is a great product with
> very good terms. Lisp is better than Smalltalk, so there's no real
> reason to bother with Smalltalk at all.
Where on earth do you get the gall to say that? I certainly prefer
Lisp over SmallTalk, but if someone who has real experience with both
prefers to use ST, I'm not going to think they're foolish; I'm going
to think they want somewhat different things out of a language.
And for all I know, ST might work better than CL for projects larger
than what I've used ST for. Particularly because there are so very
many dialects. I still think that CL is a better fit for me, but I
don't think I typify the world.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war |
,--' _,' | Wage class war! |
/ / `-----------------------'
( -. |
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
Thomas F. Burdick
> Well there are more Lisp implementations available than from any other
> language, there are at least CMUCL and CLISP and ECLS which try to be
> ANSI-Commoin Lisp what do you want more. Well maybe there are not
> fancy GUIS available
I don't know, Garnet seems pretty fancy to me. You can build GUIs
visually with CLG and Glade. And Motif isn't particularly fancy, but
it's obviously industrial-strength.
Friedrich Dominicus
> Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
>
> >
> > > If there were more programmers like that, we wouldn't have
> > > GNU/Linux, GCC, C, C++, Perl , Python, etc.
> > Well there are more Lisp implementations available than from any other
> > language, there are at least CMUCL and CLISP and ECLS which try to be
> > ANSI-Commoin Lisp what do you want more.
>
> If the case he wants to start a business based on Lisp programming? I personally would never start this business based on
> CMUCL or CLISP (I do not know ECLS).
That is your choice. I know quite a few companies which do not have
any problem relying GCC, Python, Perl, Apache and whatever is around.
>
> And a software developer-company in a Third-World country does not automatically make more money than the rest in this
> specific country (except the main company is in the US or Europe and tries to develop software in a country where the wages
> are ridiculous low).
So what?
Let us assume that you are in a third world country, for progamm
development you need a bit more than "just" a Lisp. you need hardware
and software. So a decent computer will always cost above $1000. Well
he obviously needs one to get into business. Well than of course he
needs a development tool. Well they won't take gcc or the like
because you can not settle a business based on free alternatives, so
you can't use gcc obviously. What will he do? Well he probably will
have to buy a development environment. And than he/she will have to
pay for it the "usual" price. It seems ok to pay for M$-tools but
again it seems not obviously to pay for other IDES. Bad luck I guess.
>
>
>
> > Well maybe there are not
> > fancy GUIS available well but ther is CormanLisp and LispWorks
> > available which are both reasonable priced software pieces. So check
> > the facts before starting flames.
>
> Even in Europe we would say USD 1000.- are not that cheap (assuming
>the average wages in a contry are about USD 1700.- netto).
Well should I cite the prices for one progarm hour. It's work for one
to two day for professional software developers in Europe. That's a
fact. I just wonder again why it's ok for a job in industry to cost >
100 000 EUR. but a working place for a normal programmer shouild not
cost more than 10 000 EUR. What are those for relations?
> What should one think when he earns maybe USD 200,. per month when he has to buy a software product which actually costs USD
> 1000.-.
And how much is the computer? Will he be able to get away without one?
No. Will he get away with cheaper software? Maybe. But hardly if one
follows your suggestions.
Friedrich
Thaddeus L Olczyk
There are no "free-for-non-commercial-use" ( including delivering open
source executables ) Lisp that run on both Windows and Linux and come
with an industrial strength GUI. So either get a clue or stop lie
about it which ever is the case.
The closest is CLisp but on windows the only viable GUI is TK which
I've already said I don't think of as a viable GUI. Also Clisp doesn't
support threads ( necessary because fork doesn't exist in Windows ).
A simple brief look at other languages shows that they do indeed have
such compilers/interpreters. C/C++ has gcc, with many many toolkits.
Java has Suns version (btw I know that JBuilder is free, I believe
Visual Age Forte and a few others are free too ). Smalltalk has
squeak. Even closer to home is DrScheme (allthough I can't judge the
GUI ). If you do include TK there is Tkklos.
Siegfried Gonzi
> Let us assume that you are in a third world country, for progamm
> development you need a bit more than "just" a Lisp. you need hardware
> and software. So a decent computer will always cost above $1000.
All this little pieces sum up!
> Well
> he obviously needs one to get into business. Well than of course he
> needs a development tool. Well they won't take gcc or the like
> because you can not settle a business based on free alternatives, so
> you can't use gcc obviously.
This is not true. I didn't say that free software-tools are not capable of handling business-projects. But, under my naive guess,
I develop a software and want to sell it, why should I then expect that anybody will buy it when the people are accustomed to have
free software around?
One now could make a caveat and say: "But first of all, a Third-World country should use the free tools; make money; and then they
can afford the more expensive tools".
But I think it is not that easy.
>
> > Even in Europe we would say USD 1000.- are not that cheap (assuming
> >the average wages in a contry are about USD 1700.- netto).
> Well should I cite the prices for one progarm hour. It's work for one
> to two day for professional software developers in Europe.
Please cite it! What software developers expect and what companies are ready to spent ist another topic. But normally
software-developers rate themselves way too hig.
> That's a
> fact. I just wonder again why it's ok for a job in industry to cost >
> 100 000 EUR. but a working place for a normal programmer shouild not
> cost more than 10 000 EUR. What are those for relations?
I am not sure what your figures here represent; but neither of them are reliable? You can count the worker who earns Euro
100.000.- per year with your fingers.
S. Gonzi
Dr. Edmund Weitz
> Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
>
> > That's a fact. I just wonder again why it's ok for a job in
> > industry to cost > 100 000 EUR. but a working place for a normal
> > programmer shouild not cost more than 10 000 EUR. What are those
> > for relations?
>
> I am not sure what your figures here represent; but neither of them
> are reliable? You can count the worker who earns Euro 100.000.- per
> year with your fingers.
If an employee costs an employer 100,000 EUR per year that doesn't
mean that the employee gets all this money - you should know this.
Edi.
Siegfried Gonzi
> > I am not sure what your figures here represent; but neither of them
> > are reliable? You can count the worker who earns Euro 100.000.- per
> > year with your fingers.
>
> If an employee costs an employer 100,000 EUR per year that doesn't
> mean that the employee gets all this money - you should know this.
I meant the gross amount (but not the complete amount for rents: farms,
buildings, office-rooms,...) and even then 50.000 EUR net are not the
wages which a worker can earn (or he is his own boss); and even a
programmer (lets say with 10 years experience) does not get this amount
(or he is in managment).
Before starting my PhD I had a conversation with a consultant; he said it
is ridiculous what people often expect on wages due to the believe that
they are programmers. But I can understand this, because every day a
politcian on televison says: "We need programmers".
S. Gonzi
Friedrich Dominicus
>
> >
> > > Even in Europe we would say USD 1000.- are not that cheap (assuming
> > >the average wages in a contry are about USD 1700.- netto).
> > Well should I cite the prices for one progarm hour. It's work for one
> > to two day for professional software developers in Europe.
>
> Please cite it! What software developers expect and what companies are ready to spent ist another topic. But normally
> software-developers rate themselves way too hig.
Well I'm talking about what is charged per hour. Now I have one
pricelist here (some years old) for implementation they will charge
240 DM around 120 EUR. Now picking a calculator gives
960 EUR/day. Well LispWorks Prof. costs 900 EUR. So it's not even one
programmers work day. Well this can't be hardly be told to be too
expensive.
>
> > That's a
> > fact. I just wonder again why it's ok for a job in industry to cost >
>> > 100 000 EUR. but a working place for a normal programmer shouild not
> > cost more than 10 000 EUR. What are those for relations?
>
> I am not sure what your figures here represent; but neither of them are reliable? You can count the worker who earns Euro
> 100.000.- per year with your fingers.
I was talking about a working place. Tha's just the things to provide
one worker with such a thing. Of course one have to add the payments
too, but I left that open for now.
Friedrich
Tim Bradshaw
> I am not sure what your figures here represent; but neither of them
> are reliable? You can count the worker who earns Euro 100.000.- per
> year with your fingers.
Daily costs *to the employer* are likely in the region of 300 to 1000
pounds (convert to euros as you wish). at 220 days / year, that's
66,000 to 220,000 pounds / year. Of course *not* all of this, or
anywhere like all of it goes to the person employed. Anyone who has
done contracting work, not done too much tax evasion *and* done the
figures reasonably well will see that there is a fairly large
overhead (a factor of 2 or more).
--tim
Tim Bradshaw
> I meant the gross amount (but not the complete amount for rents:
> farms, buildings, office-rooms,...) and even then 50.000 EUR net are
> not the wages which a worker can earn (or he is his own boss); and
> even a programmer (lets say with 10 years experience) does not get
> this amount (or he is in managment).
In the UK, 50,000 euros is probably slightly above the average salary
for IT people, but not extreme. *Good* people, or people with
heavily-in-demand skills (like Oracle) get 80,000 and up...
--tim
Thaddeus L Olczyk
So is this some sort of "show what a hot shot developer I am so I can
compensate for other short comings" post?
Some Lisp programmers always seem to want to take a path where they
lose site of the broad sense in exchange for the details.
The statement was: "An experienced developer reading books about Lisp
is not adequately prepared to take anything more than an entry level
job in Lisp."
Another variant was: "A manager is not likely to hire an experienced
nonLisp developer to do Lisp unless he shows significant independent
work in Lisp." (Entry level jobs excluded.)
To show a reason why these two assertions were true, I picked a simple
program ( less than an hour, fairly good considering I'm not that
experienced with Lisp ) and pulled out things that most book taught
programmers with no experience writing would not be that familiar
with.
So what do you do? In an effort to show you are not that "small" a
person, you post code showing how brilliant you are. However in
posting your code, you demonstrate precisely what I was saying.
You eschew regex's to use pathname-type. ( Kind of dumb to gloat that
you don't need to need to use regex's. What do you think pathname-type
does? What id you want to pick out a "dual" extension like foo.ps.tgz
or even a triple: foo.ps.tar.gz?) Yet pathname-type is not mentioned
in Touretzky or Winston and Horn. So already there is something the
book-learned Lisp programmer is missing. Then you hide stuff behind
directory-files and directory-directories pretending that it was not
something not found in books. ( Again the two sources don't mention
this stuff, in particular the directories command. )
The fact is this. In every project there is a lot of stuff that is
ordinary programming. ( Meaning Lisp doesn't take particular advantage
over other languages. ) Some would say slough that stuff onto C but
sometimes it isn't possible. Therefore a Lisp programmer must be able
to write ordinary programs in Lisp.
But if you ask a programmer with passing knowledge of Lisp, he will
say that you can't write such a program ( to find all file extensions
) in Lisp. Even many prorammers who know lisp will say that you
can't write such a program in Lisp. If asked to do so they will admit
they couldn't do so.
That's why you need free implementations. So that programmers can go
out and give them a test drive.
Pierre R. Mai
> > > Even in Europe we would say USD 1000.- are not that cheap (assuming
> > >the average wages in a contry are about USD 1700.- netto).
> > Well should I cite the prices for one progarm hour. It's work for one
> > to two day for professional software developers in Europe.
>
> Please cite it! What software developers expect and what companies
> are ready to spent ist another topic. But normally
> software-developers rate themselves way too hig.
Current studies show that on average programmers earn around 45000EUR
in Germany, with professional software developers averaging around
58000 EUR (total income, including benefits, etc.). Assuming 250 work
days, minus 6*5 days vacation, etc., this comes out to around
58000/220 =~ 264 EUR/day.
But that isn't what it costs the company to employ that person, which
is often nearly double that amount, i.e. 528 EUR/day.
Correspondingly, it isn't unheard of for companies to pay free-lancers
700-1000 EUR per day (I have been personal witness to such
transactions).
That means that 1200 EUR is really the cost of one-two days of a
professional developer.
> > That's a
> > fact. I just wonder again why it's ok for a job in industry to cost >
> > 100 000 EUR. but a working place for a normal programmer shouild not
> > cost more than 10 000 EUR. What are those for relations?
>
> I am not sure what your figures here represent; but neither of them are reliable? You can count the worker who earns Euro
> 100.000.- per year with your fingers.
No one has said anything about someone earning 100000 EUR. The cited
figure is what it costs a company to set up the working environment of
a worker in lots of tool-intensive fields of business.
But even in the case of normal office workers (i.e. software
developers), you will have to spend lots of money to set up and
maintain the workers place of work. Even using fairly cheap desks,
chairs, lamps, and computers the initial capital outlay surpasses 1000
EUR very, very quickly. Rent alone, even at the cheapest rates
available in e.g. Berlin (which is one of the lowest cost cities in
Germany when it comes to office rents) will cost you around 30 EUR per
person/month, and easily 4-10 times as much, and doesn't include
shared office space, heating, electricity, taxes, etc.
Employing people in industrial nations is a high-cost endeavour, hence
even something that makes your people less than 1% more productive is
cheap at 1000 EUR per person.
And that is the target market of most software development tool
providers. They don't target the high-school teacher creating
fantastically useful teaching software, they don't target the hobbyist
creating small share-ware utilities as a means to earn a couple of
hundred dollars extra per year (and lots of fun), they don't target
developing nations, etc. At the most they will provide low-cost
restricted versions of their normal products for those markets.
Take a look at most SmallTalk companies, and/or IBM, or Borland. Most
of their products are in the plus 1000 EUR category. E.g. Borland
Delphi 6:
Product incl. VAT excl. VAT
- Enterprise Version: 3864.00 EUR 3331.03 EUR
- Professional Version: 1277.00 EUR 1100.86 EUR
- Personal Version: 148.00 EUR 127.59 EUR
The personal version only allows non-commercial use, has lots of hairy
licencing restrictions, and doesn't include most of the useful
additional components, like DB access, HTML/HTTP, advanced editor
and debugger features, cross-platform component library, ActiveX, and
lots of other stuff...
If you compare that to e.g. Xanalys' pricing, I think you'll agree
that Xanalys compares favourably.
Several years back, Borland did have another focus, less competition
from under-priced stuff like Java, and correspondingly cheaper
prices. But times have changed, and Borland had to react. You can't
expect to compete against heavily subsidised stuff, and still make a
profit. So they targeted the higher-cost segment of the market, and
seem to be doing quite well. I'm highly sceptical that Borland could
exist in the "Turbo Pascal" segment of the market any longer, with
people getting all sorts of stuff for free in that segment.
[ BTW, this isn't intended to slam Delphi, which IMHO, despite earlier
problems in its implementational quality, is a reasonable choice
when it comes to creating GUI-heavy Windows applications. You can
even do fairly intricate stuff with this, e.g. in an earlier life, I
once created reusable components that more or less implemented
something similar to Kenny Tilton's Semaphores/Cells concept, in
truly drag and drop fashion, which eased the creation and
maintenance of financial calculations software tremendously. ]
Christopher Stacy
I'll check back in to comp.lang.lisp in three months and see if things are better then.
Dr. Edmund Weitz
> I meant the gross amount (but not the complete amount for rents:
> farms, buildings, office-rooms,...) and even then 50.000 EUR net are
> not the wages which a worker can earn (or he is his own boss); and
> even a programmer (lets say with 10 years experience) does not get
> this amount (or he is in managment).
According to
<http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anm-20.03.01-000/default.shtml>
(text in German), the _average_ wage for employed IT professionals in
Germany is above 50,000 EUR while the maximum is at about 110,000
EUR. Note that the real numbers are probably higher as the trade union
which published them used a basis of 35 hours per week (which in my
perception is not the usual working time in this industry).
Edi.
Bijan Parsia
> Bijan Parsia <bpa...@email.unc.edu> wrote in message news:<Pine.A41.4.21L1.02012...@login8.isis.unc.edu>...
>
> > FWIW, this is true for VisualWorks, Cincom's flagship Smalltalk. They also
> > want to audit your books and other, to me, insane things :)
>
> That's their business.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that Fraz isn't alone in this strategy.
> Meanwhile Lispworks is a great product with
> very good terms.
Sure, no one said otherwise.
> Lisp is better than Smalltalk, so there's no real
> reason to bother with Smalltalk at all.
Nice that you can turn this into a Stupid Language Flame. Thanks.
> If Lispworks is not quite as
> good as Franz Allegro technically, it's close enough that it doesn't
> make any practical difference,
Apparently it does, or LispWorks would drive Allegro out of business.
> especially if Franz's terms put Allegro
> out of reach.
Lispers are blessed with several good choices (just like
Smalltalkers). Several decent Free/free versions, etc. etc.
> My advice to everyone facing such conflicts is to just get Lispworks
> and get to work.
Why Lispworks instead of one of the cheaper alternatives? (Not a *real*
question, just pointing out that there are plenty of choices, and,
sometimes, the choices are more complex for some.)
> If we want to use Lisp to reinvent the future,
Er...how about inventing it first? :)
> we
> have to spend more time doing it and less time beating around the
> bushes trying to decide what to do.
Maybe. Learning from the experience of others seems *good*, but I forgot,
there's no reason to *look* elsewhere... :)
> The real, important, fundamental, profound questions to ask yourself
> are these:
[snip]
Sorry, they seem like silly questions to me. What are *your* answers to
them?
FWIW, as a complete side note, this type of note is a total turn off to
me. That is, I don't see any reason for *me* to support you or endeavors
you run/strongly participate in. If you had something solid to offset your
social clumsiness, that might do, but I don't see anything like
that. Pointers?
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
Tim Bradshaw
[A really good article, I think]
> And that is the target market of most software development tool
> providers. They don't target the high-school teacher creating
> fantastically useful teaching software, they don't target the hobbyist
> creating small share-ware utilities as a means to earn a couple of
> hundred dollars extra per year (and lots of fun), they don't target
> developing nations, etc. At the most they will provide low-cost
> restricted versions of their normal products for those markets.
The other significant market that software development tool vendors
target is cross-subsidizing their own products. In a slightly
different area you can look at something like Solaris: how much money
does Sun make from Solaris? Well superficially the answer should be
`nothing' because it's free. But actually they sell these nice
machines which Solaris runs on really well, and they make a good deal
of money from the machines. And no one (or very few people) would buy
a sunfire without Solaris - indeed most of the cool, important, stuff
in these machines like hot-swappable everything and partitioning and
so on is meaningless without software.
Java is an even better example. Java environments are cheap, or free.
And they have all this GUI stuff. But they're cheap because Sun are
losing money hand over fist on them to make money elsewhere. It's a
little less simple to see where, since Java is cross platform and
therefore doesn't directly sell Sun hardware. But the issue here is
that Sun see (correctly) that anything non-MS specific will benefit
them, so they're willing to fund systems which are not Sun-specific.
.NET, again. Do you think MS will make a penny on .NET? They won't
but they'll make an awful lot out of the increased market share it
gets for Windows. Go read Big Blue to see how this worked for IBM 25
years ago.
Loads of `free' software is like this too: IBM are pumping money into
Linux because it sells their hardware and their support services (and
there's another secret battle here - IBM and Sun are fighting for the
mainframe market, IBM with large machines running lots of Linux images
on top of their amazing proprietary OS (OS/390? I forget the current
name), and Sun with their large machines running Solaris). Loads of
companies employ free software authors because what they do benefits
some other business activity. They don't do it out of the goodness of
their hearts.
The Lisp vendors sell Lisp. If I buy a license to system x, and as a
result buy 10 enterprise-class machines from Sun or IBM, the Lisp
vendor doesn't get paid a penny. So they have to actually charge
enough for their product to make money.
It should not be surprising that a company that needs to make a profit
on an item has to charge more for it than a company which is making a
loss on it.
--tim
Pierre R. Mai
> You eschew regex's to use pathname-type. ( Kind of dumb to gloat that
> you don't need to need to use regex's. What do you think pathname-type
> does? What id you want to pick out a "dual" extension like foo.ps.tgz
I'd be heavily astonished if an implementation of pathname-type
resorted to using regular expressions (in the POSIX sense of the
word), where a simple character search sufficed. This introduces
needless hair and complexity, where a simple, robust and fast
alternative exists, and would lead me to question the mental acuity of
the implementor.
Obsession with RegExp's is IMHO a growing problem with professional
developers, that probably should be recognized as a work-related
illness, especially in Unix-related jobs.
> or even a triple: foo.ps.tar.gz?) Yet pathname-type is not mentioned
Again, I would never use POSIX-style regular expressions for this kind
of job. Simple character searches suffice for this kind of job. I
don't use a hairy graph-traversal algorithm where a simple tree-walk
suffices, so why should I use regular expressions when a simple
character search suffices?
> in Touretzky or Winston and Horn. So already there is something the
> book-learned Lisp programmer is missing. Then you hide stuff behind
But it is "mentioned" (i.e. specified) in the ANSI CL standard, and
I'd expect every book-learned Lisp programmer to have read relevant
portions of the standard, which is available both as a PDF file for
15$ from ANSI, and more importantly in the form of the HyperSpec, from
www.xanalys.com for free.
Anyone who doesn't regularly look at the relevant standards for any
programming language he is using/learning, is in my book neither a
book-learned nor any other kind of programmer, at all.
> That's why you need free implementations. So that programmers can go
> out and give them a test drive.
And they are abundantly available. At the same site you got your copy
of the HyperSpec, you will find personal editions of LispWorks, both
for Windows and for Linux available for free download. They include a
serious GUI IDE and GUI toolkit, lots of documentation, and plenty of
of opportunities to test drive them. The only restrictions are that
you can't redistribute applications, there is a heap limit, and a time
limit of 5 hours per session. None of those would in any way have
restricted your ability to e.g. develop the application we have been
talking about here.
Franz offers similar trial editions for free download, as does
Digitool, and Corman, too.
And then there are the open source implementations, like CMU CL, CLISP
or ECLS, which would have been totally sufficient for the purposes
mentioned here, too.
Friedrich Dominicus
>
> > If Lispworks is not quite as
> > good as Franz Allegro technically, it's close enough that it doesn't
> > make any practical difference,
>
> Apparently it does, or LispWorks would drive Allegro out of business.
>
Well the difference is how the extensions are implemented. That's
quite a difference. If you have used heavily all fancy stuff from
Franz you probably won't find a counterpart in LispWorks. If you are
used to use one compiler you'll use conveneience features sooner or
later. Those may not be portable. And they got you later ;-)
Well there is always a balance to hold betwen things which are there
(or should be there) and things which are there but not covered by
anything like a Standard. It was pointed more than once what things
are different.
On the other hand if the price policy from Franz would be ridicolous,
people may consider changing. But this change could mean that they
change e.g to another language. It just depends thick you skin about
pricing is ;-)
Regards
Friedrich
Nils Goesche
[WTF is wrong with you changing the subject line like that? Are you
nuts? Trolling?]
> On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 21:47:02 GMT, Christopher Stacy
><cst...@swingandcircle.com> wrote:
>
>>As is repeated about four or five messages on this newsgroup,
>>and documented all over the place: you can get numerous free
>>implementations of Lisp, including full-blown development
>>environments that run on Windows and Unix with several GUI kits.
> There are no "free-for-non-commercial-use" ( including delivering open
> source executables ) Lisp that run on both Windows and Linux and come
> with an industrial strength GUI. So either get a clue or stop lie
> about it which ever is the case.
Which C implementation that runs on both Windows and Linux comes
with an ``industrial strength GUI'', then?
> The closest is CLisp but on windows the only viable GUI is TK which
> I've already said I don't think of as a viable GUI.
That's your opinion. A friend of mine is working for a company
that ships an extremely expensive software product with a Tk GUI.
> Also Clisp doesn't support threads ( necessary because fork doesn't
> exist in Windows ).
Again, just arbitrary opinion. A former collegue once said ``Threads
are only for people who are too dumb to write state machines.'' The
product he is responsible for doesn't use threads at all. It is
a very large distributed system, runs on Windows, costs > 100000$ per
copy.
> A simple brief look at other languages shows that they do indeed have
> such compilers/interpreters. C/C++ has gcc, with many many toolkits.
You would seriously write a GUI application with gcc that is supposed
to run on Windows and Linux?
> Java has Suns version (btw I know that JBuilder is free, I believe
> Visual Age Forte and a few others are free too ).
``Write once, debug everywhere'' comes to mind ;-)
Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."
PGP key ID 0x42B32FC9
Siegfried Gonzi
> According to
> <http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anm-20.03.01-000/default.shtml>
> (text in German), the _average_ wage for employed IT professionals in
> Germany is above 50,000 EUR while the maximum is at about 110,000
> EUR. Note that the real numbers are probably higher as the trade union
> which published them used a basis of 35 hours per week (which in my
> perception is not the usual working time in this industry).
I know the heise-links. I believe this numebers a gross-numbers. I think
this is important to know.
S. Gonzi
Siegfried Gonzi
> Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> writes:
>
> > Please cite it! What software developers expect and what companies are ready to spent ist another topic. But normally
> > software-developers rate themselves way too hig.
> Well I'm talking about what is charged per hour. Now I have one
> pricelist here (some years old) for implementation they will charge
> 240 DM around 120 EUR. Now picking a calculator gives
> 960 EUR/day. Well LispWorks Prof. costs 900 EUR. So it's not even one
> programmers work day. Well this can't be hardly be told to be too
> expensive.
Only one second: where did I write that LispWorks is too expensive? Oh, too expensive for a worker with USD 200.- per month? If
you do not know it: nobody is discussing here prices in the West.
And I do also not believe that the dealers of Lisp are responsible for the Third-World. But sometimes I really feel that some
people believe the world is the same on every damn place on this earth.
Are you Bildzeitungsleser? Answer per private mail please, because comp.lang.lisp cannot solve the problems in the Third-World,
neither can it Lisp.
S. Gonzi
Will Deakin
> I meant the gross amount (but not the complete amount for rents: farms,
> buildings, office-rooms,...) and even then 50.000 EUR net are not the
> wages which a worker can earn (or he is his own boss); and even a
> programmer (lets say with 10 years experience) does not get this amount
> (or he is in managment).
How have you derived these figures? In the UK, for example: an
experienced c, c++ or java developer would on average be paid
about £30.000 gross[1] = 48.0000 euro. For more experienced
programmers or in certain areas of the country -- specifically
London -- the average will rise to about £42.000 = 68.000 Euro.
There will be a sizable percentage of programmers earning more
than this.
As the tax rate in the UK are about 35% -- including health care,
income tax, blah, blah, blan -- which then gives a net *average*
of about 30.000-45.000 Euro.
:)w
[1] The salaries survey that I borrowed this information from is
available at lifesupportal.com/cgi-bin/php.cgi/salarysurvey.php
and is "based on ... the salaries that real IT professionals have
actually accepted."
Friedrich Dominicus
> Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
>
> > Siegfried Gonzi <siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at> writes:
> >
> > > Please cite it! What software developers expect and what companies are ready to spent ist another topic. But normally
> > > software-developers rate themselves way too hig.
> > Well I'm talking about what is charged per hour. Now I have one
> > pricelist here (some years old) for implementation they will charge
> > 240 DM around 120 EUR. Now picking a calculator gives
> > 960 EUR/day. Well LispWorks Prof. costs 900 EUR. So it's not even one
> > programmers work day. Well this can't be hardly be told to be too
> > expensive.
>
> Only one second: where did I write that LispWorks is too expensive?
Well I just wanted to get those things right.
> Oh, too expensive for a worker with USD 200.- per month?
It depends on what one want to do with it.
> If
> you do not know it: nobody is discussing here prices in the West.
Don't we? Well than I must miss something. We were talking about
prices. And I gave some figures on how much one Lisp costs. And I
can't see that it's expensive.
>
> Are you Bildzeitungsleser?
How sensible you are.
>Answer per private mail please, because comp.lang.lisp cannot solve the problems in the Third-World,
> neither can it Lisp.
Well I won't discuss problems of the third world here. I put out some
figures for "developed" countries and this is the market for any
vendor. If you do not sell well there you hardly won't get big.
Friedrich
Nils Goesche
> Note that the real numbers are probably higher as the trade union
> which published them used a basis of 35 hours per week (which in my
> perception is not the usual working time in this industry).
In reality or in the contracts? ;-|