Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!lethe!yunexus!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crd.ge.com From: meltsner@crd.ge.com (Kenneth J Meltsner) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave? Message-ID: <15657@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Date: 14 Jan 91 15:17:20 GMT References: <2456@paradigm.com> <22573@well.sf.ca.us> <96861@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <5256@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <1991Jan14.141651.12321@arris.com> Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: meltsner@crd.ge.com Organization: GE Research and Development Center Lines: 70 LISP is not dead, despite efforts to kill it by overfeeding it. The problem may be that it will never have the wide appeal of an efficient, system implementation-oriented language like C, or the history of a language like FORTRAN. In fact, there may be more LISP users today than ever before. Look at systems like GNUEMACS, with its LISP-dialect extension language. Look at WINTERP and Scheme, etc. I recently saw a complete statistics package written in XLISP for the Mac. Common LISP may be dropping in popularity due to its size, but other LISP dialects are doing quite well. What does restrict the use of LISP? (1) Nasty delivery pricing. I remember the bad old days when you had to pay Microsoft a chunk of money to distribute programs written using their compilers. That changed quickly when microcomputer compiler vendors managed to make a living without royalty fees. But the situation is worse than simply the extra cash. There's bookkeeping and copy tracking costs to add in as well. Even if the price is not bad, the paperwork is one additional burden. How can LISP vendors make a living? I don't know. DEC and Apple allow you to generate applications without a royalty fee, but they may be doing this to help sell hardware. I'd actually suggest *raising* compiler prices, but eliminating royalty fees for non-commercial use of the runtime systems. Or giving away application runtimes, but charging extra for the tree-shakers and other runtime-development tools. LISP vendors attempt to make a living selling razor blades instead of razors, but this doesn't work if this forces you to spend all of your time keeping track of where the blades went. (2) Creeping feature-itis. LISP gets bigger and bigger, and every new extension must subsume all previous extension efforts. I don't want to start the religious disputes again, but there's always four ways to do anything in LISP, and perhaps we only need three. (3) Bad press. Management types aren't always the brightest folks, but they have wonderful memories. And they all remember LISP machines, LISP-based expert system shells, LISP gurus, etc. And the word LISP got associated with "Not suitable for real world" applications and hardware. Even if the latest generation of workstations can run LISP pretty well (and even my Mac runs a decent version of LISP), they can only remember prima-donna hardware and software maintenance types, and the incredible prices they charged. The management types who switched and made a real investment in LISP got burned badly, and no one appears to be adventurous enough to make the same mistakes again. (4) High-priced programmers. When the LISP craze hit, the market overheated and anyone with a CS 101 background in LISP got a $5000 raise. Most of these folks tried to get super-programmer salaries (based on their mastery of LISP's higher productivity environments), but barely deserved COBOL wages. LISP isn't dead. It's just recuperating from all the hype of the early '80s. -- =============================================================================== Ken Meltsner | meltsner@crd.ge.com (518) 387-6391 GE Research and Development Center | Fax: (518) 387-7495 P.O. Box 8, Room K1/MB207 | Nothing I say should be attributed Schenectady, NY 12301 | to my employer, and probably vice-versa =================Dep't of Materials Science, ACME Looniversity=================