Re: Where to find good lisp critiques?

From: Thomas F. Burdick (tfb_at_famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: 12/03/03 

Date: 02 Dec 2003 23:54:28 -0800

Kent M Pitman <pitman@nhplace.com> writes:

> tfb@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
>
> > Wow, two in a row. Heap limits and time limits are bad for students.

(This sounded more argumentative that I meant to)

> > to try something out as a professional looking to buy, you really need
> > to try the real product (kudos to Xanalys for the LW evaluation at
> > ILC, that's exactly the kind of trial I needed as a professional --
> > not that I need their product at the moment, but if the need comes up,
> > well, I know what I can get). Students don't need a lot of the fancy
> > things that production engineers do -- but heap limits and time
> > limits, well, who would you expect to unreasonably use too much space
> > and time? A student.
>
> I disagree with this. It's _surely_ possible for a student to do this,
> but students are used to enduring pain in exchange for free things.

Certainly. I wasn't arguing that students *couldn't* use the personal
edition, I was pointing out that it's not the same as a student
edition. If Xanalys doesn't want to offer a student edition (and
apparently they don't), that's fine, that's a marketing decision. I
was responding to two posts in a row implying that the personal
edition was the same thing; it's not.

> (If they don't like it, let them get cormon or a gnu-free version...)
>
> It is simply not necessary for every implementation to cater to every
> kind of user. It's VERY nice of the two big commercial vendors to
> provide anything at all, and it's ridiculous to nitpick the way in which
> they do it.
>
> CL has a hugely rich set of options for students. Probably more than
> most languages.

Definately. I think we might even beat C++ in that category.

> Whether each vendor has a rich set of options for students is a
> marketing choice for that particular vendor, and IMO it's quite wrong
> to misconstrue their decision to not do everything you wish as
> anything negative. You can wish they would do otherwise, but wishing is
> cheap and, in this case, I think not constructive.
>
> I'm sure if they could, they would. If they haven't, they're not
> going to read your message and say "oh my goodness, we had no idea
> that students were short of money" nor "oh my goodness, we had no idea
> that students are prone to pound on things heavily". The phrasing of
> your message makes it appear to "offer information" and yet you surely
> must know that the vendors already know the things you say.

That's not what I was saying at all. I wasn't trying to "offer
information" to the vendors -- I know they were informed when making
their choices -- I was trying to justify my assertion that a
"personal" version for light hobbiests isn't the same thing as a
student version.

> These seem to me to be the real issues:
>
> (1) It's very easy for student versions to "accidentally"
 [ snip ]

No argument here. That's an argument about "should", not "does".

> (2) The LW Personal Edition is sufficiently powerful that I've often used
> it either accidentally or intentionally for "real work".

Yeah, I could see that, too. There are lots of lightwieght things I
do in my day-to-day work. Again, that's an argument about
should/shoudn't, not whether they offer a student edition.

> (3) If I recall, the Personal Edition was developed and debugged as
> part of a Lisp teaching program with the Open University in England,
> and as far as I know it worked for them. So even just the isolated
> claim that students can't make do is suspect.

Of course they *can* make do, sometimes. Especially if their
assignments avoid gratuitously weird requirements that would make
using Lisp impossible. That's not what I was arguing, though. 

-- 
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         ,'  .\  / | No to Imperialist war |                        
     ,--'    _,'   | Wage class war!       |                        
    /       /      `-----------------------'                        
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