Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?



goose wrote:
Ken Tilton wrote:

goose wrote:

Ken Tilton wrote:

<snipped>

Oh, yeah, this is the other thing you old dawgs cannot be trained off.
Sorry, Charlie. $1425 is /nothing/ comapred to what other craftsmen are
paying for their tools. You want be a serious photographer?
Cabinetmaker? Guitarist? For $1425? PWUUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!


For a product which doesn't even approach the usefulness
of the free offerings (see gcc) ....

If you think C is comparable to Lisp,


Under certain conditions, maybe; in general I don't, which
is why I am making an effort to learn lisp even though
some of the regs on this newsgroup tend to troll with
strawman and/or specious arguments (see the other response
by Micheal SomebodyOrTheOther above).


what makes me think we are not
going to get very far in agreeing on the value of a Lisp environment?


A lisp environment can be very valuable, but whereas in *your*
environment its value is *only* a few hours of work (say you work
30 hours to payback the cost of 3 lispwork licences; you can
correct me on the exact rate you bill) down here the /value/
of lispworks has to be countered against 3 or 4 months of
pay, not under a week of pay. I'd gladly give up a week
of my pay to purchase Lispworks but no one would go 3 or 4
months without pay to own just another piece of software
which will most likely be overtaken by the free offerings
in a few years anyway.

Would you?

You are confused. Regrettable disparity in the wealth of nations is being solved in another NG. You have said you would gladly pay for LW if you could, so you have not been FSF-infected. I am talking about the poor confused souls who say they do not like to pay for software and so have been googling for hours trying to find a "free" solution, or get their "free" Lisp to work, and are all the while bothering other busy but confused people who gladly offer "free" support.

Now your personal estimate of how hard it is to configure and maintain a Linux system is 120 seconds.....you may be an outlier. :)



Besides, you completely missed the point: gcc is free because someone
gave it away (and continues to develop and give away again) as a
deliberate political act with the intended effect I have already
bemoaned: infecting people with the idea that software has no value (or
that programmer time has no value).


As someone else said, thats possibly Libel!

(a) You guys look so silly when you post these libel warnings, you really should resist the temptation. :)

(b) You need to read the frickin manifesto again:

" Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.(2)

This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a Unix license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided."

PWUAHAHHAAHAHAH! PC Labs sounds like they really enjoyed installing Red Hat. As for duplication, how many different Linux distros are there? PWUUAHAHHAHAHAHAA!

" This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art."

Right. And Emacs and Slime show no evidence that bitmapped displays have made for very nice GUIs for the past 22 years.

"Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes."

No, they would have done a fine job, but the FSF drove them all out of business. Great.

<snip Harvard inspiration>

"Finally, the overhead of considering who owns the system software and what one is or is not entitled to do with it will be lifted.

"Arrangements to make people pay for using a program, including licensing of copies, always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much (that is, which programs) a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them."

That does not sound like the "checkout" page of any web site I know, tho some /do/ make me want to give their developers a good flaming.

" Consider a space station..."

uh-oh...

"... where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks."

I guess the head tax is the hundreds of hours (or in your case, seconds) spent by each head trying to get Linux to play a WAV file.

"Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free."

Ahem. You guys are libelling me by accusing me of libel!

So, for me, each installation takes not more than a minute
of my attention.

How long was the first install?

kenny

--
Cells: http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/

"I'll say I'm losing my grip, and it feels terrific."
-- Smiling husband to scowling wife, New Yorker cartoon
.

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