Re: Lisp is Sin

Eli Gottlieb wrote:
> Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> >>I heard that phrase a year or so ago in this newsgroup, and I was
> >>curious too as to what it could mean. (A google of "dark age" on this
> >>forum shows that people were claiming we were in a computing dark age
> >>as early as 1991, and Alan Kay claimed "the last 20 years have been
> >>basically air guitar" for computing's evolution.)
> >
> >
> > Not only in programming language, but also in other domains such as
> > Operating Systems:
> >
> > http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
> May I make an observation? From my POV it looks as though both
> programming languages and operating systems suffer/benefit from network
> effects. Users are attracted to both by a corpus of already-existing
> work they can build on, but they both require users to build that
> corpus. In short, they both suffer from chicken-and-egg problems of
> becoming popular enough to be successful and self-sustaining.

Sure, there's various market pressures both for and against Lisp. Some
of them reinforce themselves, like network effects.

But ironically, barriers of entry can be a good thing in the market,
depending on whether you can take advantage of them. We can just look
at any business paperback about some big company, where the CEO is
boasting about entering a market with big barriers to entry.

The big black-and-white techie assumption that barriers to entry = bad
is probably ideological, as then the next question is, "Is there a
class of actors who benefit from these barriers, while others don't?"
And many people seem to have a problem with asking that.

Probably a guess though...


Tayssir

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Lisp is Sin
    ... (A google of "dark age" on this forum shows that people were claiming we were in a computing dark age as early as 1991, and Alan Kay claimed "the last 20 years have been basically air guitar" for computing's evolution.) ... there's various market pressures both for and against Lisp. ... But ironically, barriers of entry can be a good thing in the market, ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: according to a CNN poll ...
    ... number of competitors and *no* barriers to ... For our practical purposes, it's pretty useless because if your definition of "market failure" is any time a market isn't characterized by an infinite # of competitors with perfect information and no barriers to entry, then every market in history has failed, and therefore it makes little sense to single out the oil/gas market with that label. ...
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