<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Robar Philip <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:philip.robar@gmail.com">philip.robar@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im"><br>
On Jan 8, 2012, at 5:03 PM, Bob Kline wrote:<br>
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<div class="im"><br>
> The same with languages and compilers.<br>
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</div>(I will not start a language war. I will not start a language war. I will not… :-)<br>
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So tools don’t matter? Really?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Not what was said. The problem gets</div><div>to be that if one doesn't have a large </div><div>enough community of users a language</div><div>or tool doesn't have much broad effect,</div>
<div>commercially or technically. Ada, the </div><div>first claimed attempt at a universal language</div><div>by the US military died because few learned</div><div>it. And it's beyond almost anyone to master</div><div>
and remember the details of very many tools</div><div>and/or languages, so each one has to be</div><div>sufficiently useful to create a useful size</div><div>community of users. This is certainly the</div><div>case if there's to be any economic impact.</div>
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You might find Paul Graham’s, “Beating the Averages”, interesting reading. It’s a short article on how Graham and Robert Morris used Lisp in their startup, Viaweb, to outrace and out-innovate their competitors. (Viaweb was bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Stores*.) [<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html" target="_blank">http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html</a>]<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>How many people use Lisp today? </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Also, if you follow this type of thing, you’ll have noticed that there’s been a marked increase in the use of functional programming in the commercial world over the last few years. (Think Lisp, Erlang, Haskel and Scala—particularly the latter.)<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'll take your word for the marked increase.</div><div>But my statement stands that tools have to</div><div>have broad use to have any staying power.</div><div>Others might come and go with a project.</div>
<div>The same with languages. The same applies</div><div>to hardware. DSP chips for example. People</div><div>tend to stay with what they know, which creates</div><div>stability, but can delay the widespread use of</div>
<div>something usefully different. Profoundly different</div><div>and useful is very rare. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Programming languages do matter—if you’re smart enough to take advantage of them.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Somewhat tautological. Most people are</div><div>in fact not smart enough to be totally </div><div>flexible in many situations. In their fantasies</div>
<div>maybe. But from the standpoint of an industry,</div><div>you need enough people conversant in a tool</div><div>or language to get products and systems </div><div>designed, debugged, etc., in a timely and</div><div>economic fashion, with the end result having</div>
<div>a price of interest. At the highest level, people</div><div>create significant new things. Most of us don't.</div><div>At the highest levels, people don't always have</div><div>to be practical. Most of us do.</div>
<div><br></div><div> -- Bob</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Phil<br>
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* Yahoo, of course, then proceeded to rewrite much of Yahoo Stores because they couldn’t hire enough smart people** to continue development in Lisp.<br>
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** The journey-person programmer thinks they understand C, but really doesn’t. (And let’s not get started on the nightmare that is C++.) On the other hand a language like Lisp in the hands of a true master can create things of exceeding beauty, complexity and reliability in a fraction of the time you could do them in C, if you could do them at all.<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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