Paolo Amoroso wrote: > "Steven H. Rogers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >>Forth to high level ones like Lisp and APL. I'm not making significant >>use of Lisp at work and the Gardeners project could remove some of the >>barriers to doing so. > > > Any specific examples? Welcome aboard, > > > Paolo
I think the barriers have been kicked around c.l.l and various weblogs quite a bit, but here's my list. 1. AI backlash - AI is very interesting and sometimes useful, but the AI boom and bust left Lisp tarnished in the eyes of mainstream computer science and business. People need to be convinced that Lisp is a good general purpose language. 2. Misperception - Many who have been exposed to Lisp believe it to be slow, only useful for symbolic computation, or hard to learn. An APL friend who'd studied Lisp in college told me he thought Lisp was a low level language. The course that exposed him to Lisp emphasized basic list manipulation and he was left with the impression that developing serious applications would require tons of low level twiddling. 3. Inertia - Most programmers want to use what they already know to solve problems. Some want new problems, though others seem content to solve the same problems over and over. 4. Cost of Entry - The commercial Lisps are of high quality, but their licensing costs can put people off. Yes, the commercial vendors have evaluation versions and licensing terms can be negotiated, but many won't bother. The free implementations lack cross platform support for the features that a lot of people want (the Reddit problem). 5. Elitism - The c.l.l newsgroup has some vocal and sometime abrasive participants that can scare newbies away. Paul Graham's writing has done a lot to promote Lisp, but he can leave the impression that only the best programmers can use Lisp. Regards, Steve -- Steven H. Rogers, Ph.D., [EMAIL PROTECTED] Weblog: http://shrogers.com/weblog "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." -- John McCarthy _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
