I have faced these issues twice, always starting from Lisp and moving
on somewhere else. There's more on my travails at http://
wagerlabs.com/tech and http://wagerlabs.com/uptick.
I implemented a poker engine in Lisp but it appeared that to deliver
it on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX I would need to buy 3 commercial
Lisp licenses. The total cost would have been about 4K euro +
maintenance fees for LispWorks and about 18K USD + 25% maintenance
fees for Allegro CL. Allegro also comes with royalties of less than
10%. Windows Lisps are GPL so I could not use them.
What turned me off with poker was trying to write a Reliable UDP
protocol handler and having a lot of trouble with threads and timers
for some reasons. Fortunately, I discovered Erlang, quickly rewrote
my poker backend and have been happy since. That is until I
discovered Haskell :-). I'm now thinking of rewriting various chunks
of the engine in Haskell (hand ranking for example) to see how it
feels and what I gain. Concurrent Haskell coupled with transactional
memory looks attractive as well.
I also started with Lisp for my trading systems project (Uptick) but
was turned off even faster this time. I investigated what it would
take to write code that overloaded +, *, etc. for arrays or lists and
what it would take to optimize this code. It's possible but it's not
elegant or pleasant.
I love a good challenge and the challenge of learning Haskell is like
no other. It does require me to rewire my brain and to think
different. There are a number of applications where Haskell fits
nicely, google for papers on audio processing, robotics (Yampa), etc.
I have yet to find an application where Lisp would shine over
everything else.
Joel
On Sep 16, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Mark Carter wrote:
Alas, pulling against this seems to be a number of minuses. The
commercial Lisp implementations may be good, but what wannabe
hacker is going to fork out the cash for those babies? The free
ones that work on Windows are GPL, which means that although
somebody might be tempted to use them for personal projects, he is
not going to sell the idea to his boss that stuff should be
developed in Lisp.
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