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"I would not expect any new major software effort to be written in Lisp." How many companies have purchased companies whose flagship is developed in Lisp only

by Oxryly 16y ago

"I would not expect any new major software effort to be written in Lisp." How many companies have purchased companies whose flagship is developed in Lisp only to shutdown or redo all Lisp work? WTF is this pattern? Is there a name for it? (and that doesn't count the companies that did it to themselves like Amazon)

hga 16y ago
Perhaps fashion more than anything else. Lisp was fashionable through sometime in the mid '80s or so, when it was "officially" blamed for the failure of the over-hyped expert systems market. (See a bit of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_sy...) The biggest reason, of course, is what some have called the "de-skilling" of IT. The vast majority of organizations view IT as a cost center, and they (want to) view us as interchangeable cogs; this became critical when IT became so big (say, starting in the '80s). Lisp goes very much against that philosophy; as Dan notes, "Acquirers of companies with Lisp software usually make the big mistake of commanding that it must be rewritten in Java." That's a language explicitly designed by James Gosling for implementing already fixed/solid designs and it fits very well into the humans as interchangeable cogs mindset (not his fault, except in that C++ wasn't really suited to that mindset and Java fixed the intractable problem with C++ for that (manual memory management)). PG and the failed C++ re-write of Viaweb might be an example of this, Yahoo is said to be a place that doesn't attempt to hire the best engineers and that alone is very telling.
- herdrick 16y ago
  > The biggest reason, of course, is what some > have called the "de-skilling" of IT. I don't buy that. There are countless software shops that are obsessed with programmer skill and productivity, in fact live or die by it, and almost none of them choose a lisp.
  - hga 16y ago
    De-skilling has nothing to do with that, it has to do with changing jobs so that they require less skill. Assembly line factories are an example, they were an efficiency improvement over individual craftsmen that not coincidentally required much less skilled labor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling and http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming and http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=deskilling http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&f... Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill. (Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming) that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)
    - herdrick 16y ago
      The most astonishingly skillful programmers use lisp more often than average or crummy programmers, but it's still an unusual choice among them. Look at the results of the ICFP programming challenges.
- Oxryly 16y ago
  Nobody trusts programmers to scale a Lisp codebase up as the company grows at rate that satisfies stockholders.
  - hga 16y ago
    Why ever would this be true? I've never heard this as a claimed problem for Lisp, and given the extreme plasticity of Lisp code it doesn't make any sense at all (granted, you can write FORTRAN in any language, but...).

by Oxryly 16y ago

hga 16y ago

Perhaps fashion more than anything else. Lisp was fashionable through sometime in the mid '80s or so, when it was "officially" blamed for the failure of the over-hyped expert systems market. (See a bit of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_sy...) The biggest reason, of course, is what some have called the "de-skilling" of IT. The vast majority of organizations view IT as a cost center, and they (want to) view us as interchangeable cogs; this became critical when IT became so big (say, starting in the '80s). Lisp goes very much against that philosophy; as Dan notes, "Acquirers of companies with Lisp software usually make the big mistake of commanding that it must be rewritten in Java." That's a language explicitly designed by James Gosling for implementing already fixed/solid designs and it fits very well into the humans as interchangeable cogs mindset (not his fault, except in that C++ wasn't really suited to that mindset and Java fixed the intractable problem with C++ for that (manual memory management)). PG and the failed C++ re-write of Viaweb might be an example of this, Yahoo is said to be a place that doesn't attempt to hire the best engineers and that alone is very telling.

herdrick 16y ago
> The biggest reason, of course, is what some > have called the "de-skilling" of IT. I don't buy that. There are countless software shops that are obsessed with programmer skill and productivity, in fact live or die by it, and almost none of them choose a lisp.
- hga 16y ago
  De-skilling has nothing to do with that, it has to do with changing jobs so that they require less skill. Assembly line factories are an example, they were an efficiency improvement over individual craftsmen that not coincidentally required much less skilled labor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling and http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming and http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=deskilling http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&f... Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill. (Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming) that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)
  - herdrick 16y ago
    The most astonishingly skillful programmers use lisp more often than average or crummy programmers, but it's still an unusual choice among them. Look at the results of the ICFP programming challenges.
Oxryly 16y ago
Nobody trusts programmers to scale a Lisp codebase up as the company grows at rate that satisfies stockholders.
- hga 16y ago
  Why ever would this be true? I've never heard this as a claimed problem for Lisp, and given the extreme plasticity of Lisp code it doesn't make any sense at all (granted, you can write FORTRAN in any language, but...).