Subject: Re: free lisp compilers? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/09/03 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3145366895717308@naggum.no> * Friedrich Dominicus | This is an opinion and not a fact I guess. not just opinion, but the evidence is anecdotal, not fundamental. the reason it doesn't sound unreasonable to me, and in fact sounds reasonable is that when you need, say, 5 times as many programmers to handle the amount of work necessary, you get interaction costs and team overhead that slows everybody down to a quarter of their top speed alone. but you can hardly _do_ C++ work alone, except for fairly small things, like three to six months. if you were to spend 15 to 30 months like that, you'd have really a hard time. a Common Lisp programmer can get the system working in a short time, learn a lot from and develop the software with its users when it's still quite malleable. that's too hard to do in C++, so you also spend more time designing the system before-hand. all of this means more time and the demand to get it coded and deployed means more programmers, which means more team interaction overhead. all of this really adds up. | And maybe you underestimate the C++ programmers. (1) you can't underestimate C++ programmers. (the snotty version ;) (2) no, but you can't hire top-notch C++ programmers for projects like this. top-notch C++ programmers generally develop fundamental stuff like libraries and interface tools, not applications. #:Erik -- save the children: just say NO to sex with pro-lifers