Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!snorkelwacker!ai-lab!rpk
From: rpk@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Robert Krajewski)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: why lisp is dead
Summary: I'm not dead yet !  I feel happy !
Message-ID: <7853@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 13 Apr 90 21:45:14 GMT
References: <485@paradigm.com> <12789@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Reply-To: rpk@lammert.ai.mit.edu ()
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lines: 22

>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.

Unix and C ain't gonna die.  Look at this this way: given current
application trends (OOP, complex storage management), environments
that can *provide* what Common Lisp and a carefully pruned subset
of CLOS need will be the wave of the future.  The essence of this
functionality is basically Scheme, since much of Common Lisp
(generic sequence functions, math, etc.) can viewed as libraries,
not an essentially computational model.

Such environments will still have to support the many useful programs
that don't need object management.  They will probably also have to
partition data and execution privileges in a more disciplined way
than the classic Lisp Machine environment.  So what I see coming is
an environment that can support Unix/Posix/OS/2/Mac things, with
new breed of ``application'' that is actually a collection of objects
and classes that augment the basic environment, just as the typical
Lisp Machine program can offer new functions and flavors to other parts
of the machine without recourse to streams, pipes, string analysis,
arbitrary protocols, etc.