Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!hsdndev!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!mahendo!wlbr!voder!pyramid!leadsv!esl!sam From: sam@esl.com (Samuel S. Hahn) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: So who's really using LISP? Message-ID: Date: 20 Feb 91 01:17:04 GMT Sender: news@esl.ESL.COM Organization: ESL, Inc. Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 26 Greetings... I don't know who started this (I'm late to this particular discussion) but I must also go on record that there is much in my department that is quite dependent on Lisp. In fact, I'd prefer that more of my staff have Lisp expertise, because of what I know to be true regarding the productivity of Lisp environments and programmers, and what is tractable using the environment that I wouldn't seriously consider using C or other languages. In specific, there are two subsystems to my current project which are implemented in Lisp. One is a document analysis tool, the other a smart database-cognizant "stuffer" tool. Other components to the total system are implemented in C and Objective-C, but I don't think we would have been quite so successful trying these two in anything other than Lisp. What's important to us are the tools in the environment, the incremental nature of Lisp development, and therefore the actual productivity of my Lisp developers. In addition, there are constructs and concepts in Lisp that aren't quite so strongly embodied in most other languages, so that I find Lisp-cognizant staff are quite a bit more literate in language issues than most that don't have a Lisp background. -- Sam Hahn (sam@esl.com)