Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!ugle.unit.no!nuug!ulrik!math.uio.no!espen From: espen@math.uio.no (Espen J. Vestre) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave? Message-ID: <1991Jan23.094925.12728@ulrik.uio.no> Date: 23 Jan 91 09:49:25 GMT Sender: news@ulrik.uio.no (USENET News System) Organization: Department of Mathematics, Univ. of Oslo Lines: 32 References: <17374@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1991Jan23.080259.19816@Think.COM> First, this talk about lisp being dead puzzles me. At least in european academic institutions, it doesn't seem to be dead at all. Quite in contrary. And among the new lisp installations I have seen on recent visits to certain universities, are Symbolics lispmachines-on-a-card. (Alleged problems by Symbolics initiated this discussion, I understand) Second, why is it claimed that CL is "too big"? What does that mean? That applications tend to take up much space? That lisp systems take up much space? Anyway, it is certainly possible to make compact CL systems. My own favourite system takes up only 790K on my harddisk. And that includes all of CL (but not yet CLOS) with compiler, editor and window-interface. In addition there is a 200K documentation system (all of CL) and 200K of other files. Other programming languages aren't much better than that. Certain well-known unix CL implementations are much bigger than this (esp. on RISC machines), which probably is caused by a "speed first, and leave the space to unix VM"-attitude. Clumsy solutions wrt. to space is not limited to lisp, however. On one well- known brand of unix work-stations, the whole X library has to be linked with any application that uses it, which makes even a small clock a several-hundred-K application. However, harddisk (or even RAM) space is not a real problem any more, is it? ----------------------------------------- Espen J. Vestre Department of Mathematics University of Oslo P.o. Box 1053 Blindern N-0316 OSLO 3 NORWAY espen@math.uio.no -----------------------------------------