What would you do with 10 Man Years?

From: Will Hartung (willh_at_msoft.com)
Date: 03/25/04 

Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 10:32:04 -0800

Here's more of a strategic platform question.

Simply put if you had 10 man years at your disposal, how would you allocate
it to advance Common Lisp?

I originally framed this as $1,000,000, which can be argued as "10 man
years", but I didn't want folks to quibble about salaries and taxes and
crap.

So.

Given that you can "spend" the budget as you like (20 people for 6 months, 2
for 5 years, etc), what would you do with it?

You could add threads to CLISP, say, but that really only advances CLISP but
not really Common Lisp. Is the fact that CLISP doesn't have threads holding
back Common Lisp? I don't think so, regardless of how much it would be nice
for CLISP to have them.

Would updating the ANSI standard help? Put the 10 man years into committees,
and specifications, etc, so that ANSI CL can have sockets, threads, etc now
"standard"?

That would help formalize what CL is in reality, and perhaps help in
portability, but I don't think that is what's holding CL back either.

Give the 10MY to Symbolics to port Open Genera to a new platform? That may
be enough to do the port, but it's certainly not enough to have them "give
it away". So, they'd get OG 2.0 on a more modern platform, but we can't
really strut the results around against the Javas and such of the world.

Create a new LispOS from scratch? Lock 3 guys in a room with some hardware
for 3 years, I'd like to think that could make a dent in that project.

Finish MacCLIM?

What about crafting and writing an AppServer like system on top of CL?

Pour all of the resources into Dylan??? :-)

Fancy print campaigns to "get the word out"?

I look at companies like Franz (arguably the Commercial CL leader), and they
are pretty much purely market driven (as well they should be), letting their
customers lead the product. Tweaking for customer needs, assimilating
customer suggestions into new features, custom compilers, and ports. These
folks are basically tied to their customer base, so while they may well have
good and interesting ideas, they simply may not have the time and $$$ to be
speculative. We throw the 10MY at them, but, again, there may well be a
better ACL, but does it help CL in the Large?

But if given essentially Carte Blanche to "Advance the CL platform", where
would your nickles go?

(And no, I don't have $1M burning a hole in my pocket...it's a completely
speculative question.)

Regards,

Will Hartung
(willh@msoft.com)

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