Re: Making Lisp popular - can it be done?

André Thieme wrote:
Jon Harrop schrieb:
André Thieme wrote:
Also keep in mind that Sun is working on Fortress, which will most
likely lead to built in TC support in the JVM.

Sun have been "working on" many things for many years and produced
nothing worth having. I for one am not pinning my hopes on anything done
by Sun, not least because they are going bankrupt and just laid off many
thousands of employees (again).

They are in the lead though.

The CLR has had tail calls, value types and real parametric polymorphism for
the best part of a decade. The JVM still does not have them.

Today, F# is a long way ahead of anything available for the JVM.

One or two decades before Microsoft they had an OS that did not crash
daily.

Sun have posted billions of dollars losses while Microsoft posted billions
of dollars profit.

The JVM came out years before Microsoft had anything to offer. So,
it proves where the creative people sit.

But the JVM still lacks so many basic features.

And also Microsoft is now planning to lay off some thousand employees.

Allegedly. Sun have already laid off thousands of employees.

It will probably not the 15.000 about some blogs talked at first, but
still enough.

That speculation is not a very strong argument.

Google bets on Java and uses its billions against Microsoft.

Google are a one trick pony and continue to lose market share to Microsoft.

And the fast .NET still is not available for Linux and Mac.

True.

It will force you to have a Windows server system, for which the
license costs are high enough. On top of that, the JVM is already open
sourced, so in the case that Sun loses it can be continued to develop.
If that should not happen, which is extremly unlikely with Java being
the most popular language in the world, that’s still not too bad for
Clojure programmers, as Clojure would simply get an implementation on
the then leading VM.

Sun's code is an unmaintainable mess. That's why the open source community
are not developing it.

As a fast google search prooves, Java is about 340% more popular than
C#: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

So, this is a clear indication for people who like to draw conclusions
from google searches about popularity to find out which is the right way.
Uh.. wait a minute...

According to Google Trends, Java is 5x more searched for than C#:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=java%2Cc%23

However, according to ITJobsWatch the market share trends in the UK over the
past 4 years are C# 14%->30% and Java 36%->22%:

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/csharp.do
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/java.do

Microsoft target the rich market.

Microsoft are guilty of many things but they have realised the benefit of
building upon a solid foundation, created .NET and now provide the most
advanced core for software development in the world. I would like to see
real competition from a viable alternative as much as the next guy (I have
been a Linux user for many years and our company server still runs Linux)
but the fact is that Microsoft currently have no competition when it comes
to VMs.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u
.

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