Re: Where to find good lisp critiques?

From: Ray Dillinger (bear_at_sonic.net)
Date: 12/03/03 

Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:08:50 GMT

Kent M Pitman wrote:
>
> tfb@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Bur***) writes:
>
> > I agree with most of what you've said here, but one should be careful
> > with saying "student edition" around students, because it does have a
> > fairly specific meaning among university students. "The personal
> > edition is intended for student use" is fine, IMO.
>
> Programming language has a specific meaning, too. It means something with
> mostly C++/Java syntax. But I wouldn't tell the makers of PostScript or
> that they must use the term carefully becuase they don't have what people
> will recognize as a programming language. I say "good for them" if they
> stretch someone's imagination, and too bad for anyone who assumed a
> programming language had to be a certain way.
>
> Further, I guess the thing that really miffs me about this whole
> discussion is that people tout the wonders of free software and how
> wonderful it is, but as I've said over and over until I feel like a
> broken record: it drives down the cost one can charge. What's the net
> effect? That people are more fussy and less willing to pay. And NOT
> just for student editions. So it's hard for the commercial vendors to
> do what you're asking as a more or less. But worse, only the
> commercial editions seem to have the cool things that you're
> recognizing as the whizzy thing that students want. So free software
> is not an engine that has cranked out what students need, and it has
> undercut the ability of vendors to cater to the needs of students.
> The reason that the more popular languages can do what they do is that
> they have a larger installed base and can afford these margins.
> It irks me the kind of society we've seemingly voluntarily built
> for ourselves. If free software is so cool, let it crank out cool free
> interfaces. If it's not, tell it to stop making it economically impossible
> for those who would crank out such a thing to charge money. We should be
> willing to pay for the things we get, and when we are unable, we should
> be thankful, not critical, of what we get. Grrr. Fume, fume...

We don't seem to be able to find a good middle ground. Remember that
the "free software" thing was founded mainly by programmers (or
code-artists if you prefer, since they are mainly motivated by aesthetics
rather than economics) who wanted tools we could legally use for projects
that weren't undertaken for money.

They wanted to provide software for community organizations and charities
who operate on razor-thin margins in the first place; they wanted to
provide software for use in the third world where everybody's going to
copy everything anyway and nobody has money to pay for it. They wanted
tools they could use on pet projects they were doing because the problem
interested them rather than because they thought they could make money.

And they got together and they did it. On the whole, I think that cheap
ubiquitous software has made the world a better place for most people,
even if it has shrunk the margins in the software business and lots of us
are now out of paying work.

It's interesting to note that most of the "margin" that's left in software
is tied up with flashy UI -- which, so far, is precisely what code artists
have considered to be too boring to bother with. In other words, the best
and most interesting work is now being done by artists, because they want
to: compilers and databases and servers and protocol engines and operating
systems and so on are all free, because they were compelling and interesting
enough to motivate people to work on it regardless of whether those people
would be paid, and because the design tradeoffs of every design leave every
artist convinced he can make something more True or more Beautiful, so they
always undertake new ones. What's still profitable is UI, which is mostly
so boring and uniform that there's no compelling reason for a code artist
motivated by aesthetics to work on it -- no new ground to cover, no
interesting problems to solve, few and trivial design tradeoffs. You have
to pay people to crank out that crap because it's dead boring. Problems
that are interesting enough, the code artists will solve for free.

This is now starting to put programming in the same category as music
or writing. There are hundreds of would-be novelists for every
published writer, thousands of struggling cover bands for every successful
recording contract with a major label. The reason is the same; if you
have a field of endeavor (music, novel-writing, programming) which some
people (artists) find so compelling that they will do it regardless of
whether they get paid, it becomes hard to make a living in. And like
bubblegum-pop singers, you can make money without much talent by doing
stuff that's popular with the uneducated masses; in this case slick UI.
But it has about the same level of artistic depth, which is why there's
so little artistic competition over it.

Regarding student use: If I were instructing students in CL, I'd tell
them they had to program in Common Lisp, point out some of the major
implementations, and maybe walk through a few examples using CMUCL in
class. If they used Corman, or Franz, or whatever else, personal or
student or otherwise, I wouldn't care. But I would make sure there
was a no-cost system available, because I know that a lot of students
are really and truly living with a hand-to-mouth poverty where the
only reason they come up with tuition at all is scholarships and iron
savings discipline combined with several minimum-wage shitjobs. Their
budget for class materials can be a couple hundred bucks per class or
less and I'm going to want them to have a good textbook so half of
that is already gone.

                                Bear