Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!think!mincy
From: mincy@think.COM (Jeffrey Mincy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Message-ID: <15769@think.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jan 88 05:33:43 GMT
References: <5084@well.UUCP> <5223@utah-cs.UUCP> <675@athos.rutgers.edu>
Sender: usenet@think.UUCP
Reply-To: mincy@godot.think.com.UUCP (Jeffrey Mincy)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
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In article <675@athos.rutgers.edu> hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes:

>It is quite true that a complete CL is beyond the ability of the
>typical university hacker to produce.  However if you start with Spice
>Lisp, producing a CL is probably not much worse than any other Lisp
>dialect.  It's certainly within the realm of a team with a few good
>people in it.  It doesn't need anything like the resources that were
>used to produce some recent big systems, e.g. X.  However if you had
>to do it from scratch (i.e. without Spice Lisp), and you had to do it
>within a couple of years (Spice Lisp took far longer to produce
>something complete - which is why so many CL's based on Spice Lisp
>started out as half-baked), it would probably require a team that only
>a couple of big-name institutions could put together.  It's a fact of
>life that software is getting bigger.  It's hard for one guy to
>produce a major package these days (except if he's RMS).

While I generally agree with what you have said, (CL is not exactly
easy to implement), I do not agree that CL requires two years with
a team from big-name institutions.  

KCL was implemented by four people in about 6 months.  Two were from
kyoto (obviously), and two were from NDG (nippon-data general).  
They did not start from spice lisp.

I believe that the time it takes for a project requires to a large
part on decisions made early on in the project.  The kcl team wanted
to implement CL quickly and portably, and that is what they got.

--
Oh yea, while Im at it, I believe that both KCL and Data General 
were left out of the master list of common lisp implementations.

--

-- jeff
seismo!godot.think.com!mincy