Re: Decreasing the "standard deviation" of lisp

Ken Tilton wrote:

Ben Prew wrote:

Are you saying that the entire concept of language "standard deviation"
is flawed, ...

I will (say the entire concept is flawed). With a qualification. I agree
that Python and Java benefitted from being similar to C. The flaw I see
is... so what happened to Dylan?

I would also argue the Perl benefited from having traits similar enough
to both C and sh/bash, that both programmer and sysadmin were able to
pick up Perl with relatively little pain.

Having spent a little time looking at the syntax and style of Dylan, I
would agree that it lowers the "standard deviation" relative to lisp,
and you're right, I don't know what happened to Dylan.

Perhaps having similar syntax isn't enough. Unfortunately, I don't
know much about Dylan, its community, its libraries, etc, so I can't
speak to its possible shortcomings.


I think one needs to look closer. Look at Python in its first five (I
made that up) years when no one knew about it. Same with Perl and Ruby.
O'Reilly cannot publish enough of those books now, but what was going on
before they became The Latest New Thing?

I had a brief discussion with some of my co-workers about it, and I
think a good indicator of relative popularity is the number of articles
published on the language, or loc in the Python and Ruby equivalent of
CPAN.

I also looked up some relatively recent information about language
popularity [1], [2] and [3], but as expected, its hard to quantify
popularity.

Most of the people I talked to agree that rails offered a big boost to
Ruby, but I can't really think of a "killer app" for Python or Perl.
Perl has its whole
I'm-a-scripting-language-I-can-automate-crappy-tasks-and-I-sorta-integrate-with-C-thing
going, and for a while it was synonymous with CGI, but I'm not really
sure it holds that distinction anymore, and so it will be interesting
if it can maintain its popularity, in the long run.

The Lisp family of languages has certainly been around for a long time,
so there's definitely a point to be made about not chasing every
current popular trend, and there's definitely some problems of code-rot
by creating a 'new-lisp-user' package, as what's generally accepted now
(while, for, etc), may not be the norm 10-20 years from now.

Then maybe we can figure out why Dylan did not happen. Did it skip a
grassroots phase during which it quietly spread by word of mouth? Java
had the luxury of a shortcut: funding from Sun.

Yeah, I really don't know much about Dylan, but now that you've
mentioned in, I'm certainly interested in looking at it, if only from
an anthropological standpoint.

And, I totally agree about Java's shortcut, the funding and "support"
from Sun went a long way to help "legitimize" Java, and I think they
did an excellent job of positioning it as the next big "enterprise
class" language, right down to the large body of standards, and
extensive bureaucracy :)

This grassroots thing, if I am right, is what Ron and Jeff do not get.
Ron does not want to work on a portable sockets library, nor does jeff.
They want to /first/ get the entire community to agree on a new program
to Fix Lisp, then form a committee, hold elections, create by-laws, put
up a web site... you know, CLRFI.

:)

Meanwhile Ken and Frank are taking what Peter did and trying to add
OpenGL and Cells so we can have a drop-dead portable CL GUI to use. If
it works, Peter and Thomas might like it. And so it goes...

That sounds like it could be much more beneficial then my half-baked
ideas :).

Also, and this may be better as another topic, but is there a library
store, similar to CPAN, for lisp? I thought what asdf did, but when I
looked into it more, it looked like it had more in common with make
then CPAN.

I think something like that would be very useful, as since CL has been
around for such a long time, and from what I'm hearing, there are
mountains of code out there that one just has to find. Why not make it
easier to locate it?

Note: By CPAN, I mean a "generally accepted storage location/website
listing of lisp libraries, uploadable by anyone willing to create an
account"

[1]
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/12/ruby_book_sales_surpass_python.html
[2] http://csharpcomputing.com/Reviews/languagesByJobNumbers.htm
[3] http://www.dedasys.com/articles/language_popularity.html

--
Ben


ken

.

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