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From: larry@tweety.Berkeley.EDU (Larry Rowe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.clos
Subject: Re: CLOS' popularity
Message-ID: <42236@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 24 May 91 02:29:02 GMT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.42236
Sender: nobody@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: larry@postgres.Berkeley.EDU
Organization: U.C. Berkeley EECS Dept.
Lines: 26

I don't like to get into these arguments but sometimes I can't
resist...

The difference between Saber C++ and Lisp is that it takes
me a couple of minutes to recompile the production system
and I'm guaranteed that it will be *much* smaller.

I agree that more sophisticated performance tuning can often
substantially improve the space performance of Lisp, but the
problem is it takes a 4-star guru and lots of time, both of
which are scarce.

Now let's get real.  You own a $500K house and you're about
to develop a new product for your very own company.  Would you
bet your house on your ability to produce a *competitive* product
using Lisp?  I.e., if you have a product that no one buys, you
lose your house.  That's a big risk and most people making business
decisions avoid as many risks as they can.  

BTW, don't give me the superior productivity argument (i.e.,
Lisp can produce high function systems rapidly) because I run
on an 8 MB Sparcstation and I'm not going to run a >16MB calendar
program.  Why 8 MB you ask?  No good reason.  But most commercial
companies buy 500 workstations at a time and they can't afford
to by an addition 16 MB for every workstation.
	Larry