Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: why lisp is dead
Message-ID: <2222@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 12 Apr 90 16:25:09 GMT
References: <485@paradigm.com> <12789@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 58

In article <12789@dime.cs.umass.edu> Kelly@Vega writes:
>In article <485@paradigm.com> gjc@paradigm.com writes:
>>>Why? Mainly the unreasonable cost of the RUNTIME portion of a lisp.
>>>
>>>three costs:
>>>(1) technical cost of the overly-complex and large runtime portions.

Isn't it a financial cost too?  One has to buy larger and more
powerful machines in order to run Lisp; and such machines cost more.
For example, I use a ~10 mips, 8 megabyte machine.  It runs a wide
range of programs written in C without much trouble, but if I want to
use a Common Lisp on it, I usually stick to KCL because larger ones
take a noticable performance hit from paging.  

Moreover, I find it really annoying that I can't write little programs
in Lisp (because they automaticaly become big programs) and have to
use C instead.  Common Lisp implementations are a step backwards in
this respect compared to earlier Lisps such as Franz.  [Note that I
say implementations.  Someone could, I suspect, produce a Common Lisp
with different properties.]

Not only that, in some ways C has a better programming environment
than the Lisps that would run on the same machines.  (Try dbxtool
on Suns, for example).

>>>(2) financial cost-of-sales for runtime licenses.
>>>(3) administrative costs of runtime licensing procedures.

>Common Lisp is more of an Operating System than just a programming
>language.  [...]

But some people are happy with their current OS and don't want to
replace it with a completely new one that may not run the other things
they want to run.  Common Lisp ought to be analogous to a compiler
plus a library.  Sure, some implementations will be in a Lisp-based
OS, but not all of them.

Indeed, it's things like Symbolics Genera that are analogous to
an OS, not Common Lisp.

>You assume that the delivery machine already has UNIX, or MS-DOS, or
>whatever.  If you have to deliver your application with an Operating
>System, you would certainly have to pay a license fee for the OS.
>You are buying into the OS, not C, when you use C as your programming
>language.  

Um, quite a few people do have machines that already have Unix,
so it's perfectly reasonable to want to deliver applications for
such machines in Lisp just as one could in C.

Most people are not going to change operating systems just to use
Lisp.

>Common Lisp will be an Operating System.  When you start
>writing programs that use multiprocessors and parallelism,
>you will rapidly discover that UNIX and C are dead.

Right now, C seems to be winning here rather than losing.