Subject: Re: Promoting Lisp
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/11/03
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3119091487182988@naggum.no>

* Gregory Santos <gregs@digaudio.com>
| With my qualifications, how can I help achieve this?

  I would suggest acquiring a commercial Lisp development environment, and
  develop tools to help create your other software, instead of using Perl
  and shell scripts and such, and as you get more experience, use Lisp to
  "think", while you might still deploy in some other language.  it is not
  glorious work, but it _will_ give you a lot of experience just coding
  stuff up and working with Lisp code.  this will help you figure out which
  of these things you find easier to do with Lisp.  if among them you find
  a task for which Lisp is particularly well suited, you have also gained
  the ability to argue for this to your peers or managers or clients or
  whatever, and so that could be your first real project and showcase.
  take it from there.

  note that this does not make Lisp "mainstream" for others, but it does
  make Lisp "mainstream" for yourself, and I think anybody who wants to
  make a change needs to start with himself.  it is also very frustrating
  to wait for others to make the necessary difference first.

  BTW, the purpose of using a commercial Lisp environment is to gain solid
  experience with the stuff it provides above and beyond Common Lisp and
  which turns out to be necessary to developing Common Lisp applications.
  my favorite environment is Allegro Common Lisp from Franz Inc, which
  comes in a free Trial Edition for Linux.  (I don't recommend IDE's and
  the like because I have never seen any good programmers who have grown up
  on them (or even on Windows in general) -- most such programmers are
  _extremely_ lazy and unwilling to do what it takes.  I keep looking for
  good programmers constantly, and the ones I have found are not mainstream
  nor do they use mainstream tools or languages.  this should not really
  come as a surprise to anyone.)

#:Erik
-- 
  The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?