jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) (02/02/88)
n 5084@well.UUCP, yours truly writes: >There are only two CL vendors selling CL implementations for multiple standard >architectures, Lucid and Franz. WRONG! There are three CL vendors; IBUKI markets and supports a commercial, enhanced version of Kyoto Common Lisp. (And of course I also left Kyoto out as a university developed Common Lisp). >Out of the three mentioned above, only Franz is profitable... IBUKI says they are profitable; given their original development costs, I should hope so! The number of units sold is on a par with Franz and Lucid. It should be pointed out that IBUKI requires a back end C compiler to get native code. It should also be pointed out that it pays to advertise; how else are people going to know about your product :-)? Jeffrey M. Jacobs CONSART Systems Inc. Technical and Managerial Consultants P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 (213)376-3802 CIS:75076,2603 BIX:jeffjacobs USENET: jjacobs@well.UUCP
jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) (02/09/88)
In <995@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>, Andy Freeman writes: >Fine, there are very few paying customers for Common Lisp. Were there >more BEFORE Common Lisp? ("Yes" isn't a complete answer; a list of >vendors and sales figures would be nice.) ... The answer is NO, there weren't many before CL. I think there might have been more vendors, if we count some of the PC Lisps that basically got knocked off. Lisp's reputaiton as a big expensive, difficult to learn language that ate computer resources like there was not tomorrow is not new; Common Lisp merely keeps it going. In <5223@utah-cs.UUCP>, Stan Shebs writes: >Hopefully this article will be a little more closely reasoned than John Allen's >contribution. On the other hand, I haven't noted particularly high editorial >standards in AI Expert; Allen's article had some serious boners that should >have been caught by a competent technical editor. It doesn't resemble Allen's article at all. I did get a kick out of the fact that the cover of that issue had "Against the Tide of Common Lisp" listed as an article; I was never approached and of course Allen's had a different title. AI Expert has improved significantly under Philip Chapnick, enough so that I would write for them again. (They seriously butchered my introductory article on A Simple Structure Editor way back in the early days). Can't be any worse than that atrocity that AI Magazine published a couple of issue back ("I didn't attend the sessions, but I'll write about them anyway). Jeez, and that's supposed to be a respected journal. Quo Vadis, Lisp? will either amuse you or p*ss you off. Be sure to write the editor; I'm trying to get paid for every letter it generates... Stan continues (about NIL and MIT): >You imply that they were seriously trying. University projects have a way >of coming and going with people and their interests. A more accurate phrasing >would be "MIT unable to generate much interest in producing a CL". >>3. University of Utah, [...] still only had a subset of Common Lisp. >Still true. We do have another project to build a Common Lisp from the >ground up, using more advanced techniques than have yet been applied to >Lisp systems. Unfunded at present, so progress depends on the energy of >the various participants. (Diminishing energy in my case, due to impending >graduation.) Charles Hedrick writes: >it is quite true that a complete CL is beyond the ability of the >typical university hacker to produce... > However if you had >to do it from scratch (i.e. without Spice Lisp), and you had to do it >within a couple of years (Spice Lisp took far longer to produce >something complete - which is why so many CL's based on Spice Lisp >started out as half-baked), it would probably require a team that only >a couple of big-name institutions could put together Can I rest my case now? (And thanks for the history of DEC-20 CL!) Several people mentioned POPLOG/CL; the last time I looked at the SDS manuals the CL portion was far from complete. Several people also mentioned XEROX; yes, they did ship, over a year late. Several people also confirm various forms of the *rumor* that I reported, i.e. XEROX to OEM Sun equipment. Personnally, I doubt that they will port their own Lisp to that machine... Arun Welch, <5493@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, writes: >>1. NIL, featured prominently on the cover of Steele, was stillborn. MIT, >>the birthplace of Lisp, unable to produce a Common Lisp. >I don't know what you mean by stillborn. I used it for about 2 years, >and I know of other people in other parts of the country who did too, The version that I got was terribly buggy, and nobody ever answered the phone. It basically has been dead for quite a while. Besides, I can't accept as a 'complete' Lisp one that doesn't have GC... He also mentions HP; HP is OEM somebody else's Lisp now... >And another vendor missing from your list is BBN ACI, who report quite >good sales of their Butterfly SCheme, and will probably report even >better sales of Butterfly Lisp ... >so it's not expected out until June Scheme is not Common Lisp... Future availability is called vaporware :-) (*NOT* doubting BBN's ability to come through). Gary Fritz, in <6950006@hpfclp.HP.COM>, writes: >JJacobs, there are reasons for "abandoning" proprietary CL's other than >a supposedly brain-damaged lanaguge spec >and it doesn't make sense to expend >engineering effort on maintaining a >non-mainstream language. Gary, I pick on the size and cost of CL far more than the brain damage; you simple provide support for my position. Jeffrey M. Jacobs CONSART Systems Inc. Technical and Managerial Consultants P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 (213)376-3802 CIS:75076,2603 BIX:jeffjacobs USENET: jjacobs@well.UUCP