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From: rpk@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Robert Krajewski)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: why lisp is dead
Message-ID: <7855@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 13 Apr 90 22:04:03 GMT
References: <485@paradigm.com> <12789@dime.cs.umass.edu> <2222@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: rpk@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Robert Krajewski)
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lines: 32

In article <2222@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>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.

This is becoming less and less of an issue; 8-meg machines are not
so uncommon now in the Macintosh world, and in the PC world, such
amounts of memory are accessible via modern environments such as
OS/2 and Windows 3.0.  i3/486s and 68030/40s are quite acceptable
both as development and delivery platforms.

>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.

Ahh, but what happens if you write a C program that uses a big library
in an environment that does not support dynamic linking ?  Then, you
run into a similar phenomenon, albeit much less drastic.  (At Gold Hill,
we estimated the Common Lisp core to cost about 600kbytes of moderately
optimized 286 code.)  Again, Lisp functionality like to reside in a
library or OS-core (minus the historically-mandated baggage of
sequence functions and other MacLisp artifacts).  Powerful support
is amortized by reuse.  The driving impetus is the demand for powerful
programs that are made tractable only by the services that are associated
with Scheme or Common Lisp.