Re: Interesting developments since "Beating the averages"?

Tin Gherdanarra wrote: 
Arguably, Paul Graham's essay has been very influential
and was the seed crystal that put Lisp into the spotlight.
I noticed that Lisp moved from belittled fringe player
to radical chic since then. However, I'm under the impression
that not much has changed in terms of technology and
community efforts. Peter Seibel's admirable book and
promising current gardeners-project is the only exception,
but I might have missed something. If so, what? Maybe
it's too early to tell, but I don't have the feeling
that Lisp's handicaps have been alleviated since April 2001
when "Beating the averages" came out. But maybe I'm
wrong because I was looking at the wrong places.


http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=62198&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=757976&highlight=

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f7e44b6483c4f0fe

I think that Lisp's traditional strengths in symbol manipulation are exactly the sort of thing which likely have received a lot of funding in the last four and a half years,* but you'd have to look carefully for evidence of this, as it isn't exactly being trumpeted from the rooftops.

Also, if you look at a five year chart of SUNW, you can see how well Java has worked out as a 'save the company' strategy. Five years ago, Python was the hot new thing. This year, it's Ruby. Not exactly schadenfreude, but all that we need for success is that our competitors continue to fail.

"...not much has changed in terms of technology and community efforts": Well, my vote for best Lisp technology in the past five years would go to SLIME. While it's certainly true that Lisp still has a way to go to be more newbie friendly (standard TCP/IP & threads, better and more standard graphics libraries, Cells documentation), I believe that Lisp's stability is generally an advantage, in the sense that the core language doesn't need the constant tweaking that you see in less mature languages.

Five years ago, our most comprehensive collection of libraries was probably the old CMU AI repository. Things are improving.


* Assuming competence in the places where such decisions are made.
.

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