Subject: Re: Is LISP dying? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/18 Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3141310154691952@naggum.no> * Johan Kullstam <kullstam@ne.mediaone.net> | I've tried CMUCL, clisp and ACL5. I find that they are all awkward at | producing a "hello world" application. of course they are. however, have you ever seen how much work it takes to boot a modern Unix machine and run a C program just to have it print "hello world" in an xterm running under MOTIF? man, it sucks. and it's even more work if it tries to run NT. the machine should be doing a very limited amount of work for this very simple task, but instead it spends minutes booting and preparing itself to be useful, not to mention all the crap necessary to get a program in C able to produce that output. yea, verily, it sucks. unfair comparison? not at all. why do you think they chose that phrase? because they were developing Unix and the C compiler. it's appropriate to make a machine print "hello world" to verify that everything works after all the mind-boggling nonsense has interfered with the real purpose of a computer, and you never know which part of booting up will fail due to a minor bug. the delight in a C programmer's eyes when his machine thus booted typed "hello world" back at him would probably parallel that of a Common Lisp programmer when the satellite communications subsystem he designed beams back "hello world" after an almost-aborted launch, a navigation jet which misfired, and the solar panels sustained some damage by space debris. normally, it's unnecessary to have confirmations of basic operations, but it makes perfect sense under C. there are other simple tasks that require a tremendous infrastructure to make a trivial task come back with a positive result. e.g., you need DNS to be set up right, routers and firewalls must to do their job, the local network and telecommunications links must let stuff through, etc, before you can type "ping elvis" and have the system type "elvis is alive" back at you. this is actually so delighting that there is a disproportionate number of machines called "elvis" for this particular reason. (I think it would be much more fun to have machines called "thelma" and "louise".) who, these days, would pick up a telephone and consider "hello" to be a landmark event in human history? while there's nothing wrong with a strong sense of fascination with "all that which just _works_ around us", getting excited about "hello world" programs appears to me to be a sure sign of insanity, or at least a fairly constant case of missing the boat. | it's just that unix and windows are set up to support C and C++. e.g., C | has a largish libc these days. these two statements are pretty much contradictory. the problem is that neither Unix nor Windows _actually_ support either C or C++, but they manage to make them work, with downright incredible effort. if you look inside the libraries and see how a system call actually works and how much it differs from the C calling convention and usage, you'd be a fool not to revise your opinion. and _does_ an operating system that forces the programmer to check to see whether the operating system did what it was asked to do every damn time you ask it to do anything actually give any relevant form of support to anyone? in my view, Unix and Windows support Common Lisp better than they support C because C is designed for a 70's style machine and operating system, which modern machines and operating systems have to mimic with all their flaws and misdesigns, while Common Lisp is a modern language that is well suited to be hosted on modern systems, and it just happens to be, too. the irony here is that Common Lisp has been what these machines and operating systems have aspired to support for all these years and now that they have finally grown to the task, people have so many problems with the software written while they were growing up that day-to-day survival has obscured everything to the point where people who are too young to know that computers were designed to help people think better, not just do the same old menial labor faster, believe there is nothing more to it than luring lots and lots of people to perform menial tasks by mouse instead of by lever. anyone remember how the fear that machines would take over the world quieted down as Bill Gates started to peddle his limpware? the computers sure did take over the world, but whoever is afraid of toothless little poodles who all wag their tails when they expected monsters? imagine a little icon that said "My Scary Monster" or "My Scary Neighborhood" and a browser that said "abandon all hope ye who click here". wouldn't sell much, would it? and that's why they are called "confidence games". I remember someone saying that if it hadn't been for automatic switches in the telephone network, the entire population of planet earth would have had to be telephone operators to handle the load of telephone usage in 1993 or thereabout. I get the eerie feeling that because modern computer systems are so incredibly braindamaged in their design and in the tools used to program them, the entire population of planet earth will be programming these idiotic boxes pretty soon if managers don't wise up to the fact that the equivalent of automatic switches already exist and have done so for at least 20 years. yet if Y2K doesn't light up most manager's view of the world of programming, there isn't hope for mankind at all. so, yeah, Lisp is dying because we all have to program in C++ to Bill Gates' tune, so we don't have time to think about making a better world with better languages and less menial nonsense in programming computers. the same thing happened in the last revolution, but fears in those times caused labor unions and a strong sentiment against all business in some quarters. user unions these days can't even stop the U.S. Congress from enacting more laws to protect the software companies from Y2K lawsuits. but of course, Lisp isn't dying -- it's just that if you think in terms of the imminent end of the world, _everything_ is soon food for the great garbage collector in the sky and whoever is not scrambling in panic looks like they aren't moving and have been passed by or are dying. the problem I see is not that Bill Gates has shaped the world of useless trinkets in software, but has also managed to spread his competitiveness and his personal fear of losing to imaginary competitors to businesses and homes everywhere, so now everybody is _afraid_ of losing some battle which isn't happening, instead of getting about their own lives. like, if you aren't using today's fad language in the very latest version of the IDE, you'll be left behind. aaaugh! but it's good that some people run like they are scared out of their wits. if they suddenly disappear over the edge of a cliff, a good number of people will notice in time and _not_ follow them. those are the ones that matter. you can scare most people most of the time, but you can't scare all of the people all of the time -- some will always use Common Lisp. #:Erik, who'll stop cross-posting to comp.lang.misc now -- @1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century