Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ptsfa!ames!husc6!ut-sally!utah-cs!defun.utah.edu!shebs
From: shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: FORTRAN,ADA
Message-ID: <5174X@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 88 00:00:00 GMT
References: <4732@well.UUCP>
Sender: news@utah-cs.UUCP
Reply-To: shebs%defun.utah.edu.UUCP@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 72

Good old jjacobs is flaming again!  RAM has bowed out on this one, but I have
a few spare moments to counterflame...

In article <4732@well.UUCP> jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:

>ADA, while it has is problems, is a very well though out, well constructed
>language.  The process that resulted in ADA and the process that resulted
>in Common LISP are worlds apart, the only similarity is the use of the
>term "committee".

Jacobs must be angling for DoD money or something.  I don't think I've ever
heard anybody, not in the pay of the DoD, say anything good about Ada...
Tony Hoare's Turing lecture certainly had some critical remarks, to the
effect that we risk missiles hitting our own cities by using Ada.
(I don't know what he thinks about CL.)

The process resulting in Ada had the advantage of a sponsor deciding in
advance that it was going to be successful (the DoD *never* has failures, of
course!), while the CL folks had to design the language for acceptability
to an uncoercable community, and it was not at all certain whether it would be
successful.  I would say that its success over many competitors is an
indication that, by and large, CL is a pretty good language.

CL has also been victimized by rising expectations;  years ago it was
criticized for being too radical and too ambitious, for instance by
adopting lexical scoping as the default.  Now lexical scoping seems to
be taken for granted, and CL is criticized for allowing dynamic variables...

>CL is a nightmare; it has effectively killed LISP development in this
>country.

You're going to need some facts to back up that assertion.  I see plenty
of Lisp work going on.

>It is not commercially viable and has virtually no future
>outside of the traditional academic/defense/research arena.

People outside this arena don't generally have any interest at all in
higher-level languages.  There are *no* successful general-purpose languages
above the level of C/Pascal/Ada (4GLs are fairly specialized).  CL in fact
has the best shot at success, but it needs some good cheap implementations.

>It should
>be embarassing to everybody in the field that most shells and tools are
>no longer written in LISP.

It *is* embarassing, but CL is not the reason;  the same thing would have
happened if (for instance) Scheme had been standardized on.  I place the
blame on lazy and timid Lisp implementors who forgo optimizations because
"they would compromise Lisp tradition", and companies who get away with 
selling shoddy systems because there is little or no competitition.

>To quote Dick Gabriel, the "father of Common LISP":
>
>"Common Lisp is a significantly ugly language.  If Guy and I had been locked
>in a room, you can bet it wouldn't have turned out like that" - WESTEX 86
>(or maybe 85).

Yeah, it would have looked like APL, been partially implemented once, and
ended up on the giant dustheap of forgotten languages.  1/2 :-)

To take another quote from Gabriel, this time from the 1984 Lisp conf:

"... the world is better off having a Common Lisp than not."

I seem to remember that last year or the year before or sometime, Jacobs
was hinting at a fantastic new Lisp dialect that was going to supplant
Common Lisp and presumably start a revolution in computing... wonder whatever
happened to it?

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu