🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <goochb.327.000893D1@rwi.com>, goochb@rwi.com (William D.
Gooch) wrote:

> In article <dbell-1104960125190001@wholder2.cts.com> dbell@shvn.com
(Doug Bell) writes:
> >....
> > If those other languages had all the answers, 
> > then we'd know because they'd be behind the great and successful
> >products, which they rarely ever are.
> 
> Nonsense.  AutoCAD and Interleaf are both Lisp-based products.
> American Express uses a Lisp system for automatic card purchase 
> authorization (ever notice how much more reliable theirs is than most 
> other such systems?).  The list goes on, and my personal knowledge 
> of it is certainly limited to a very small subset.  A large percentage of
> the ones I do know of are proprietary and confidential, because their
> use gives the company who built them such a significant competetive
> advantage.
> 
> Certainly we don't see a great number of end-user PC applications 
> built in the relatively less popular languages.  Mainly they're found
> in a commercial-use environment, where the advantages of Smalltalk
> or Lisp/CLOS in dealing with complex problems can be very significant.

Good examples, but it doesn't refute my claim that Lisp, Prolog, etc. are
_rarely_ (not never) used in successful products.  And in environments
where a large product is being produced for relatively few users, such as
American Express' internal card purchase authorization system, the
economics of the situation support the extra computing resources often
required by a highly generalized language if it reduces the cost to
implement.  To what extent a generalized language or a 4GL language
reduces the cost of implementation is debatable, but certainly a case can
be made for this.

> The now-familiar windowing paradigm of PCs and Macs originated
> in the Lisp/Smalltalk world long before Apple or Microsoft co-opted it.  

Now this is an example of what I think have been some of the best
contributions made by the programming languages of the
intelligentsia--exploring new ways of doing things and proving concepts. 
It's just that for whatever reason, the realization of the worthwhile
concepts usually falls to a work-horse language.

> BTW, I'm not claiming that any language has "all the answers," and
> I don't think anyone else made that claim either.
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> William D. Gooch
> RothWell International
> goochb@rwi.com
> Texas liaison for the International Programmers Guild
> For information on IPG, see http://www.ipgnet.com/ipghome.htm
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let's just say that to some extent, the answers a language *does* have
must be relative to the impact of the software which results from it. 
What other measure would you apply?

Doug Bell
dbell@shvn.com