Mike McDonald <mikemac@mikemac.com> wrote:
+---------------
| ... When I worked at SGI, I was given the task of writing a system for
| collecting and analyzing traces of the operating system. The analysis
| portion was ideally suited for Common Lisp and CLIM. So I contacted Franz
| and got an evaluation copy so I could prototype the app. After completing
| the demo and presenting the advantages of using Lisp over C/C++ ...
+---------------
Wow! I never knew anything in Lisp had even gotten *that* far at SGI!! ;-}
+---------------
| ... management decided that Lisp could not be used for the implementation
+---------------
Bummer.
+---------------
| ...C based culture. Very few engineers at SGI have much experience,
| if any, in using Lisp for engineering problems. (Hi Rob!)
+---------------
Yes, I'm still here. And still occasionally hacking in Lisp
(well, mostly in Scheme). But only on personal or non-critical
"internal tools", never "products"...
I have one tool written in Scheme that gets used by others (a sort of
"peek/poke" tool to help bring up new hardware), but even to get *that*
accepted I had to glue an infix front-end on it. So to (say) increment
to contents of a memory-mapped register, instead of saying:
> (w32! reg-addr (+ (r32 reg-addr) 1))
you say [somewhat reminiscent of Tcl]:
> w32 reg_addr [r32 reg_addr]
And instead of:
> (define incr-mem! (lambda (addr) (w32! addr (+ (r32 addr) 1))))
> (incr-mem! #x80001234)
>
You say:
> def incr_mem = fn addr in w32 reg_addr [r32 reg_addr]
> incr_mem 0x80001234
>
[Yes (*sigh*), I had to make the "0x" form of hex numbers work,
so they could cut&paste from C header files!!]
+---------------
| (At my current company, I also wasn't allowed to use Lisp for a well suited
| project. So I implemented a small lisp interpreter for it. But since my boss
| has no idea what my product does, I have been able to get away with it.)
+---------------
Yes, as always, "forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission". ;-} ;-}
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855 rpw3@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
2011 N. Shoreline Blvd. FAX: 650-964-0811
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA