Re: Joel hammers the final nail into Lisp's coffin


Mallor wrote:
John Thingstad wrote:
On Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:15:21 +0200, Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Since Paul sold ViaWeb 8 years ago, the number of high-profile Lisp
failures (1) is greater than the number of high-profile Lisp successes
(0). Having people using Lisp and consistently losing money is much,
much worse than not having people using it at all.

Interesting. Care to quantify that.
(Links, examples..)

I consider Naughty Dog to be a failure.

Please? What are you smoking?

The guys made millions. They created fantastic games which were rated
extremely high by critics and gamers.They sold millions of copies of
these games. Plus they sold the company for even more money to Sony.
You can't have much better success than that. The first games were
developed with Lisp systems and the later games even were based on a
Lisp system running on the Playstation. Which means they sold millions
of these Lisp-based games.

Btw., if you actually could program some Lisp, you might even get a job
at the new company of them. But all you seem to do is to post some poor
comments on Usenet. If you want to spend your time with some Lisp
system, get Jak & Dexter. It has been created by a Lisp system (Allegro
CL) and runs on a Lisp system (GOAL runtime).

This example says that yes,
companies will try out Lisp, even invest significant resources and ship
products with it. But eventually, they'll think better of it and
abandon Lisp.

Some not. Some are running Lisp systems for more than twenty years.

Paul Graham's example also shows the world that Lisp has
no staying power.

Bla, it enabled some guys to enter a market very quickly.

Moving from prototypes to early production systems is one of the main
strengths of Lisp.
This has been demonstrated thousands of times.

It may get a guru programmer to a certain point,
even a very profitable point, but the commercial examples do not
demonstrate repeatability.

What commercial examples do you know? Three, or four? In which Lisp
products were you involved? Or is it all just hearsay?

What the world needs is a killer app that has to get done in Lisp

Bla. What the world may need is better software that doesn't get
cracked by schoolkids.

because one simply isn't gonna achieve it with a pile of code monkeys.
The competitive advantage has to be sustainable, not just a one hit
wonder.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

.

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