Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!hc!lanl!lambda!roberts From: roberts@studguppy.lanl.gov (Doug Roberts) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Unix Vs LISPm Religeous Wars, was Re: Tired C programmer... Message-ID: Date: 2 May 89 04:00:04 GMT References: <166@ncis.tis.llnl.gov> <1131@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov> Sender: news@lanl.gov Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory Lines: 45 In-reply-to: raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov's message of 2 May 89 00:56:13 GMT [Stuff about how tiresome Unix development environments can be] [Stuff about how wonderful LISPm's are] [Much more of this and it will begin to sound like the stupid grep vs. search wars going on in comp.software-eng] . . . Haven't we all heard this before? LISPMs are superior for developing LISP code. Granted. After all, that's what they were put on this world for. Unix boxes are superior general purpose machines. My point, (being made from the point of view of a former Symbolics bigot), the one I attempted to make about three follow-ups ago, is that each environment has its strengths and weaknesses. My own personal choice, after fours years of life in front of a 3600 was to switch to a Sun. And while I've cursed the sparsness of the LISP environment on the Sun as compared to my old 3600, my overall productivity has improved because of the other tools provided by Unix (grep, find, pipeing, awk, troff, tbl, eqn, me, tar, fsck & format [ever try to repair a bad block on a Symbolics disk? It can be done. It's not fun. For that matter, have you ever tried to boot your Symbolics diskless after its disk cratered?]...). On the optimistic side regarding LISP on the Unix boxes, I suspect that better development environments will be forthcoming. I've seen improvements in Lucid's product, and it wouldn't surprise me if other vendors (Envos, Franz, Symbolics??) didn't try to capture some of the Unix LISP market by providing more powerful development environments than currently exist. --Doug -- =============================================================== Douglas Roberts Los Alamos National Laboratory Box 1663, MS F-602 Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 (505)667-4569 dzzr@lanl.gov ===============================================================