Re: can anyone offer Lisp job?

> From: Ulrich Hobelmann <u.hobelm...@xxxxxx>
> even 10 years ago, computers were really affordable.

Only for people who have a lot more money than I have. I bought my
brand-new Macintosh Plus (1MB RAM, 20MB hard disk) in early 1990 when I
had a job at Stanford and could get the computer on an employee
discount ($1500 instead of $2500). I couldn't afford anything
newer/better until 1998 when I had a very temporary surplus of
disability income so that I could spend $300 on a used Macintosh
Performa 600 (8MB RAM, 160MB hard disk) and some more money on a
brand-new SupraExpress56 data/FAX modem and a brand-new SyQuest EzFlyer
(230MB per disk cartridge). Since mid-1998 I've been going deeper and
deeper into debt just to pay basic living expenses, and the MacPerforma
has allowed me to keep up with some stuff that should have helped me
get employment, but should-have and actually-does are a world apart
it seems.

Last Fall one of my Java instructors gave me his old junk laptop that
he was going to throw away or donate to eBay: 39MB RAM, 1500MB hard
disk, Java 1.3.1 and RedHat/Gnome Linux, no CD-ROM drive at all,
diskette drive doesn't work, modem stopped working when I was in the
middle of trying to download a GNU C library needed for something I
wanted to try, and I don't have the money to get the modem card fixed
or replaced. But GNU Emacs works fine, and I downloaded BeanShell
before the modem died, so I can use GNU Emacs to teach Lisp to
beginners and use GNU Emacs --> FIFO --> BeanShell to have a decent
editor->parse-eval-print IDE for Java in addition to elisp.

> The local university here provides COBOL classes, so there must
> still be some demand.

Maybe for young people who are accepted for internships, but for anyone
over 40 there's no way to ever get a job again. I have 22 years
progarmming experience, but NASA internship program rejected for all of
the two years I was qualified by my classes at DeAnza, so NASA doesn't
think 22 years is enough experience for even an internship if you're
over 40.

> Anyway, if I have to code with the devil, I choose Java for that.

With BeanShell, Java is a decent development environment. Have you
tried BeanShell yet? If the modem in my Laptop still worked I might
offer to give you a copy of my elisp functions and key bindings for
passing the current region to the FIFO, and the Java code to read from
the FIFO and parse-eval-print whatever it gets, inside try-catch block
to protect against those common syntax errors during development.
Or if you live near Sunnyvale you can come visit me and let me show you
the emacs file containing that code and you can manually transcribe it
to your computer.

> Seems to be the new COBOL, after all.

Nah, COBOL is like FORTRAN, fixed-length fixed-format records. Java
supports arbitrary-length strings as objects with handles,
pointy-structures/containers, etc. almost like Lisp.
.

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