Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.clos
Subject: Re: CLOS' popularity
Message-ID: <4900@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Jun 91 17:17:13 GMT
References: <9105131105.AA13630@hcsrnd> <9105181833.AA05092@rice-chex> <1991May28.033548.26907@cs.cmu.edu> <4846@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991May30.082921@disuns2.epfl.ch>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 45

In article <1991May30.082921@disuns2.epfl.ch> baechler@disuns2.epfl.ch (Emmanuel Baechler) writes:
>In article <4846@skye.ed.ac.uk>, jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>
>> For years, I have been hearing that it doesn't matter that Lisp
>> requires vast amounts of memory, because menory is so cheap.  For
>> years, I have been hearing that it doesn't matter that Lisp is
>> so poor at delivering applications because it's so great at
>> development.
>
>  The amount of memory doesn't matter: memory *IS* really cheap today,
>and SparcStations are cheap CL platforms. In addition, they are really
>quick at running lisp. 

In the paragraph following the one you quote above, I wrote

   I still don't have a machine that's big enough to run the big
   Common Lisp implementations together with their programming
   environments ...

The machine on my desk is a SPARCstation.

The amount of memory does matter.  Still.

>  All the Common Lisp implementations I know are now sold with CLIM

Is CLIM available only commercially?  Or is there some public domain
or nearly public domain version as there was for CLOS, CLX, and CLUE?
If the former, it will be much less useful.  Theer are many people who
can afford KCL + CLX who can't afford one of the commercial Common
Lisps.

>> Quite a bit can be accomplished by picking the right implementation,
>> but it's a pain to end up using several varieties of Scheme and Common
>> Lisp in order to get reasonable results.  Too many implementations of
>> Common Lisp seem to have decided that it hardly matters how big they
>> are, thus leaving many users with too little choice.
>
>  How big is X11, Gnu Emacs, AutoCad, LaTeX? Everybody complain while CL 
>looks big, while none does about all our other favorite tools, which are
>frequenlty as big, and require quite a lot of memory too.

X11, GNU Emacs, and LaTeX all run reasonably well on the machine on
my desk.  I don't happen to use AutoCad.

-- jd