Subject: Re: Harlequin was: Re: Is LISP dying? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/18 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3141301464404092@naggum.no> * Pierre R. Mai | So I think there are a number of Lisp jobs out there. OTOH you probably | have to be more flexible to take advantage of them (i.e. relocating, | changing areas of interest, etc.), than for many other languages that are | a tad more popular. in my experience, which is somewhat limited, but that may actually serve the point, certain areas of interest are best catered to by adding lots of manpower to their solution, areas which will be "popular" in the most obvious sense of the word, while other areas of interest will not attract people in great spades regardless of the monetary rewards, such as those that ask for significant dedication because of such things as very high risks, skill requirements, entry costs, etc. if you choose one of those areas of interest, no manager in his right mind places silly demands on your programming language of choice and he will probably fire you if you choose "popular" languages subject to vendors who care only about the mass market and not about quality, unless his real plan is to fire you, anyway, only to replace you by someone equally uncritical of his tools. e.g., write some software to analyze the quality of the Y2K code that really _stupid_ managers have invested in some 20 years too late and now have lost control over to the point where the solution (fixing broken code with new, largely untested code written by the kind of people who think there's nothing wrong with ripping really stupid people off) opens up for even more costly problems than the problem. if you can manage to write software that can identify vulnerabilities in newly added code by the turn of the century, such that people can use your tool to prepare counter-attacks or invest in security measures or schedule time in the court system when they know whom to sue for what and how much, you could stand to make more money in the remaining 167 days than you could in the whole of the next millennium. solution: find areas of interest not invaded by populistic opportunists. my suggestion is to avoid _any_ area where the solution space is covered by existing code. on the other hand, generalizations where people make do with "menial" systems because of too varying requirements may be a good place to introduce intelligent programming languages. e.g., while accounting and finance are pretty well known areas, you could figure out a way to plan for budget reallocation according as political conditions change (such as taxes) -- frightening amounts of human intelligence are wasted on beating the idiots who change the rules all the time. such a tool might also help the idiots in power "visualize" the likely effects of their many proposals, which _might_ help us get less political idiocy beta-tested using people's lives. is it still "artificial intelligence" when the task is to model human stupidity, or would only preventing its devastating consequences get an "AI" rating? #:Erik -- @1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century