Subject: Re: Is LISP dying?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/07/26
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3141967668875519@naggum.no>

* Greg <nospam@erols.com>
| Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your statement
| 
|   why are you so sure abou this?  it is in the best interest of people who
|   desire users to make something _appear_ new, and if you need programmers
|   to get excited about your new free software project, what better way to
|   get them interested than to re-package some old stuff in maringally new
|   ways that can't be used with the rest of the old stuff?  take a good look
|   at what the industry accepts as "invention" these days, and shudder.
|   free software will not change this, it will only redirect the efforts to
|   and the means of appearing new and attractive.
| 
| as meaning the software industry isn't being particularly creative.

  I'm frankly amazed.  this was a response to the line

||And nobody has tried enough possibilities yet to find the ones that have
||lasting value.

  from Michael Coughlin.  I was trying to explain to him why his point of
  view is formed by what he has seen publicly.

  for the purpose of trying to explain the obvious to you, let's partition
  the industry into two fields: (1) the people who write software and are
  creative in that field, and (2) the people who write marketing drivel for
  the mass markets and are creative in that field.  group (1) do lots of
  cool stuff that nobody see outside of their small groups of developers,
  as it true of all technical creativity, and they would easily find stuff
  of lasting value.  group (2) hype up lots of trivialities and repackage
  old ideas as new because that's how the mass market works, and do their
  very best to make nothing have lasting value, because lasting value means
  reduced sales of new trinkets.

| If so, I retract my comments based upon that interpretation.

  I consider it done.

| However I haven't seen any convincing arguments amidst the venom.

  open your eyes, then.  they appear to have been closed after you had
  decided you had seen enough to make your unfounded judgments of others.

#:Erik
-- 
  suppose we blasted all politicians into space.
  would the SETI project find even one of them?