Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!lll-lcc!well!jjacobs From: jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Ada,Lisp,Flames Message-ID: <5084@well.UUCP> Date: 27 Jan 88 04:39:23 GMT Reply-To: jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA Lines: 114 In <5174X@utah-cs.UUCP>, my good friend Stan Shebs writes: >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.) As usual, Stan ignores what I say in favor of his own strawman. The process and thought that went into designing Ada resulted in a much better language than CL. Ada has much better import/export/package facilities, better typing facilities and a much more coherent syntax. I am talking about *quality* of the final language. As to missiles hitting our cities, I often think that the best hope for survival of the human race is the fact that a lot of this stuff probably won't work if it's ever really used. >>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.But enough of this >random flaming; let's get to the meat of one of my arguments. I disagree; I also cover this topic in the upcoming March issue of AI Expert in an article entitled "Quo Vadis, Lisp?" We can cover this when that appears. >>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. Ok! Let's look at the facts; I hope that some of the rest of the net will contribute information on whatever they are doing. Let's also keep "Lisp work" confined to development and implementation of Common Lisp, *not* applications, editors or what have you. I would appreciate any corrections or contradictions to the following. Rumors are clearly identified as such. Commercial: 1 There are only two CL vendors selling CL implementations for multiple standard architectures, Lucid and Franz. Estimated number of copies sold by each is ~2,000, for a total of 4,000. 2. One major vendor for MS-DOS, Gold Hill. Number of copies sold unknown, but of the (nearly) Steele Complete 286/386 versions, probably under 3,500. Several minor vendors selling incomplete subsets. Franz/Coral only true Common Lisp for Macs. Out of the three mentioned above, only Franz is profitable; Gold Hill is (rumored) to be close to self supporting, depending on how you look at it. 3. DEC continues development of it's own VAX-Lisp; virtually all other hardware vendors have abandoned or are planning on abandoning internal development in favor of OEM'ing from Franz or Lucid. This includes HP (Rumor). 4. Lisp Machines Inc. is history. 5. Symbolics is in deep yogurt, losing money, laying off people, unable to issue more stock and firing its Chief Financial Officer. Rumor has it that they are madly trying to develop a 68020 version. 6. Xerox Common Lisp. MIA (Missing In Action). Apparently still not ready to release. **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture running one of the above. (Repeat; **rumor**). Universities: 1. NIL, featured prominently on the cover of Steele, was stillborn. MIT, the birthplace of Lisp, unable to produce a Common Lisp. 2. CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete version of CL, aka Spice. (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20 Common Lisp is. Charles?) 3. University of Utah, as of the last time Stan and I went round and round, still only had a subset of Common Lisp. By Stan's own words, an incomplete implementation is "broken" :-). Are there any Universities seriously working on full scale, Steele-complete CL implementations? If so, let's hear about them. (There should be adequate funding guaranteed so that these implementations stand a reasonable chance of being "Steele-complete"). >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. Gee, whatever happened to blaming it on the failure of hardware to keep pace? Of course, we are all awaiting Stan's version that will blow all the lazy implementors away, and sweep the world. Did you ever stop to consider that there is so little competition because there is so little demand? Jeffrey M. Jacobs CONSART Systems Inc. Technical and Managerial Consultants P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 (213)376-3802 CIS:75076,2603 BIX:jeffjacobs USENET: jjacobs@well.UUCP