Subject: Re: How I lost my faith (very long) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 11:55:19 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3223367723455944@naggum.net> * "Marc Battyani" <Marc.Battyani@fractalconcept.com> | I don't know if you are new to Lisp but I can assure you that the Lisp | community is growing again and more active each day. The only thing that | is needed is more people to contribute all those little libraries instead | of whining that lisp is lacking them. Well... It would be really nice if it were possible to provide a Common Lisp library for a virtual machine in a standard format that got compiled to native machine code either upon execution or importation into the system. In order to offer a Common Lisp library today, you either have to have access to all Common Lisp implementations on all platforms you think your customers might need (and pay licenses for them), or provide source code. I think this choice _really_ sucks. From some of the discussions I have had with others who would like to offer libraries for Common Lisp environments that cost huge amounts of money to use, giving away things for free when there are other operators in the market who make a killing in license fees is unpalatable. I am far from alone in this regard, and this is probably a much bigger "threat" to the market that would sustain Common Lisp than anything else. That the same vendor who charges the heftiest license fees suddenly and without warning kill other commercial projects by offering something as Open Source, often with dubious quality, does not help. Open Source is in my view an overreaction to the evils of Microsoft and it has some "stopping power" towards the progress of those bad people, but I seriously doubt that it has lasting value in its own right. For some cogent thinking on this topic, see this article: A New Paradigm in Intellectual Property Law? The Case Against Open Sources. http://stlr.stanford.edu/STLR/Articles/01_STLR_4/article.htm As for what I would really like to see implemented with all the Common Lisp implementations, I think Java got the virtual machine concept just right. One may argue over the implementation and its many choices and tradeoffs, but specifying the language in terms of this virtual machine is a good thing, not the least because lots and lots of code can be shared without having to share source code, including comments, internal functionality, etc, which one would not like to share as such even though it is necessary support functionality for the shared functionality. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.