4 ms·

Right. Gcc was free. And had wider reach than lisp. Not sure how this is a counter point? You could somewhat freely get some compilers. Sun paid a ton to ge

by taeric 4y ago

Right. Gcc was free. And had wider reach than lisp. Not sure how this is a counter point? You could somewhat freely get some compilers. Sun paid a ton to get Java to people.

skissane 4y ago
> Not sure how this is a counter point? GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing. So lack of massive corporate backing is insufficient as an explanation of Common Lisp's lack of free availability (on then-mainstream platforms) circa 1995. I think the real explanation is, at that point, the Common Lisp community mostly didn't get why it was important. And by the time they got it, it was too late.
- taeric 4y ago
  GCC being freely available is by far the exception, historically. Such that I don't really get your point. Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free? And, as I said in a sibling thread, my assertion is that it took massive corporate spending for Sun to get inroads with Java. In large because they were competing with GCC.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free? Because RMS is an ideological obsessive for whom software being free was more important than making money. Although he wrote a major Lisp implementation himself (Emacs Lisp), he saw C as the more pragmatic path to making free software widely available than Lisp. Also, as a former employee, MIT gave him a lot of (in-kind) support. (Actually GCC was not the first free compiler. RMS started out planning to turn LLNL's free compiler for a Pascal derivative, Pastel, into a C compiler. But he abandoned that approach, because the Pastel compiler was a big resource hog by the standards of the time – it was initially developed to run on a supercomputer, it wouldn't work on the Unix workstation RMS was using.) CMU Common Lisp was free, and CMU's research funding paid for it. But their focus was on Unix workstations, they never saw the value in porting it to x86 (let alone DOS/Windows). By the time the x86 port happened (done by volunteers, not paid for by CMU), Java had already taken off.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Hardly anyone cared about GCC in those days, most compilers were still commercial. In fact, GCC only started to matter to UNIX folks, because Sun introduced the concept of user and developer UNIX workloads, and all UNIX vendors followed along, making the UNIX development tools into an additional package one had to buy. Thus the race to improve GCC started.
    - dleslie 4y ago
      gcc was relevant on DOS and Windows thanks to djgpp; it was basically the only free option for a time.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        No one cared about it, Borland and Microsoft dominated, those that could not buy them, would get copies from a street bazar.
        skissane 4y ago
        It was popular with people who came from a Unix background and wanted to port Unix software to DOS/Windows (or even OS/2). While the API differences were still a challenge, GCC did better at code ported from Unix than Borland/Microsoft/etc did - especially since a lot of that software was already being compiled under GCC on Unix anyway True that Borland/Microsoft was more popular among professional DOS/Windows developers, especially those for whom that was their native platform > those that could not buy them, would get copies from a street bazar Teenage me didn’t know of any “street bazaars” selling Microsoft/Borland developer tool warez. But I walked into the local computer shop and saw some modestly priced CD-ROMs, with GCC (among other things), and convinced my Dad to buy them for me.
- lispm 4y ago
  > GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing. But it had. Most operating systems were written in C. Lot's of supporting libraries were written in C. Stallman chose to implement a C compiler because of that. There is and was a huge eco-system around C just because it is a low-level language used to implement the basics of many systems. Lisp was only accidentally used for a few operating systems - the AI programmers needed capable workstations, there were none and thus they developed their own and wrote their OS in a language they knew best. Outside of that community C was (or became) the standard for implementing the low-level and application environments on top. Most Lisp implementations contain a runtime written in C (and assembler). Apple tried to write early OS stuff and applications in PASCAL. C and then Objective-C replaced that.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Stallman also chose to build Emacs and Emacs Lisp. He could have made an editor extendable in c only, but did not. Emacs' problem, then and now, was non-existent, then terrible DOS and Windows support. Really, the problem was that there was no DOS or Windows lisp available for cheap, or free. Even GCC was only available thanks to a small company, Delorie, who made djgpp. I would have greatly preferred to program in lisp; but on DOS and Windows all I had was C, Pascal, and Basic; thanks to Borland, Delorie and Microsoft. Later I had Java, Python and Perl; again thanks to companies like ActiveState. The focus on UNIX-only kept these other languages, free or not, from being useful to the broader public.
    - skissane 4y ago
      > Emacs' problem, then and now, was non-existent, then terrible DOS and Windows support. I don't know when GNU Emacs first became available under DOS. If you look at the GNU Emacs 18.59 source distribution (October 1992), while it doesn't support DOS/Windows, its FAQ mentions a DJGPP-based port to 32-bit machines called Demacs (which wasn't pure GNU Emacs, it was actually based on the Nemacs fork which added improved Japanese language support). The many limitations of MS-DOS (8.3 file names, no multitasking) meant that it was essentially impossible for GNU Emacs under MS-DOS to work as well as it did on more capable platforms. Windows 3.x/9x/Me laboured under many of the same limitations – 9x/Me didn't have a 32-bit command line environment, all it had was DOS boxes and COMMAND.COM, plus some horrible kludge by which 32-bit console applications would have their I/O routed through a DOS process (CONAGENT.EXE) via a VxD. While NT-based Windows fixes many of those problems, it doesn't fix all of them – for example, until relatively recently (some Windows 10 build), Windows had no pseudoterminals (except for various flaky unofficial workarounds), which put big limitations on Emacs support for subprocesses compared to other platforms. Now at last it does, but I'm not sure if GNU Emacs has been updated to support them.
dleslie 4y ago
> > It was Sun's corporate backing and muscle that enabled you to get their SDK for free. It was GCC being free, and on DOS thanks to djgpp, that made it successful; and it didn't need corporate megabucks to do it.
- taeric 4y ago
  I think you are talking past me, though. My claim is that it took massive corporate bucks for Java to get inroads. Specifically because it was competing with some free options. Common lisp had nothing like that. Nor did Ada. Or... really, any other language? Microsoft did a pretty heavy push with C# and the general .NET ecosystem. Though, even they had to resort to destroying a lot if the VBScript world that had proliferated quite heavily by just being available on tools that folks otherwise had.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Java was free, too; and at the time, djgpp was effectively the only free c++ toolchain on DOS and Windows. Common Lisp wasn't even available to DOS and Windows users, let alone free or corporately backed. Even now every single free common lisp has substandard or outright broken Windows support. Common Lisp didn't bother to show up to the party. That's the first problem; it was priced terribly, when it did become usefully available.

by taeric 4y ago

Right. Gcc was free. And had wider reach than lisp. Not sure how this is a counter point? You could somewhat freely get some compilers. Sun paid a ton to get Java to people.

skissane 4y ago

> Not sure how this is a counter point? GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing. So lack of massive corporate backing is insufficient as an explanation of Common Lisp's lack of free availability (on then-mainstream platforms) circa 1995. I think the real explanation is, at that point, the Common Lisp community mostly didn't get why it was important. And by the time they got it, it was too late.

taeric 4y ago
GCC being freely available is by far the exception, historically. Such that I don't really get your point. Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free? And, as I said in a sibling thread, my assertion is that it took massive corporate spending for Sun to get inroads with Java. In large because they were competing with GCC.
- skissane 4y ago
  > Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free? Because RMS is an ideological obsessive for whom software being free was more important than making money. Although he wrote a major Lisp implementation himself (Emacs Lisp), he saw C as the more pragmatic path to making free software widely available than Lisp. Also, as a former employee, MIT gave him a lot of (in-kind) support. (Actually GCC was not the first free compiler. RMS started out planning to turn LLNL's free compiler for a Pascal derivative, Pastel, into a C compiler. But he abandoned that approach, because the Pastel compiler was a big resource hog by the standards of the time – it was initially developed to run on a supercomputer, it wouldn't work on the Unix workstation RMS was using.) CMU Common Lisp was free, and CMU's research funding paid for it. But their focus was on Unix workstations, they never saw the value in porting it to x86 (let alone DOS/Windows). By the time the x86 port happened (done by volunteers, not paid for by CMU), Java had already taken off.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Hardly anyone cared about GCC in those days, most compilers were still commercial. In fact, GCC only started to matter to UNIX folks, because Sun introduced the concept of user and developer UNIX workloads, and all UNIX vendors followed along, making the UNIX development tools into an additional package one had to buy. Thus the race to improve GCC started.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    gcc was relevant on DOS and Windows thanks to djgpp; it was basically the only free option for a time.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      No one cared about it, Borland and Microsoft dominated, those that could not buy them, would get copies from a street bazar.
      - skissane 4y ago
        It was popular with people who came from a Unix background and wanted to port Unix software to DOS/Windows (or even OS/2). While the API differences were still a challenge, GCC did better at code ported from Unix than Borland/Microsoft/etc did - especially since a lot of that software was already being compiled under GCC on Unix anyway True that Borland/Microsoft was more popular among professional DOS/Windows developers, especially those for whom that was their native platform > those that could not buy them, would get copies from a street bazar Teenage me didn’t know of any “street bazaars” selling Microsoft/Borland developer tool warez. But I walked into the local computer shop and saw some modestly priced CD-ROMs, with GCC (among other things), and convinced my Dad to buy them for me.
lispm 4y ago
> GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing. But it had. Most operating systems were written in C. Lot's of supporting libraries were written in C. Stallman chose to implement a C compiler because of that. There is and was a huge eco-system around C just because it is a low-level language used to implement the basics of many systems. Lisp was only accidentally used for a few operating systems - the AI programmers needed capable workstations, there were none and thus they developed their own and wrote their OS in a language they knew best. Outside of that community C was (or became) the standard for implementing the low-level and application environments on top. Most Lisp implementations contain a runtime written in C (and assembler). Apple tried to write early OS stuff and applications in PASCAL. C and then Objective-C replaced that.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Stallman also chose to build Emacs and Emacs Lisp. He could have made an editor extendable in c only, but did not. Emacs' problem, then and now, was non-existent, then terrible DOS and Windows support. Really, the problem was that there was no DOS or Windows lisp available for cheap, or free. Even GCC was only available thanks to a small company, Delorie, who made djgpp. I would have greatly preferred to program in lisp; but on DOS and Windows all I had was C, Pascal, and Basic; thanks to Borland, Delorie and Microsoft. Later I had Java, Python and Perl; again thanks to companies like ActiveState. The focus on UNIX-only kept these other languages, free or not, from being useful to the broader public.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > Emacs' problem, then and now, was non-existent, then terrible DOS and Windows support. I don't know when GNU Emacs first became available under DOS. If you look at the GNU Emacs 18.59 source distribution (October 1992), while it doesn't support DOS/Windows, its FAQ mentions a DJGPP-based port to 32-bit machines called Demacs (which wasn't pure GNU Emacs, it was actually based on the Nemacs fork which added improved Japanese language support). The many limitations of MS-DOS (8.3 file names, no multitasking) meant that it was essentially impossible for GNU Emacs under MS-DOS to work as well as it did on more capable platforms. Windows 3.x/9x/Me laboured under many of the same limitations – 9x/Me didn't have a 32-bit command line environment, all it had was DOS boxes and COMMAND.COM, plus some horrible kludge by which 32-bit console applications would have their I/O routed through a DOS process (CONAGENT.EXE) via a VxD. While NT-based Windows fixes many of those problems, it doesn't fix all of them – for example, until relatively recently (some Windows 10 build), Windows had no pseudoterminals (except for various flaky unofficial workarounds), which put big limitations on Emacs support for subprocesses compared to other platforms. Now at last it does, but I'm not sure if GNU Emacs has been updated to support them.

dleslie 4y ago

> > It was Sun's corporate backing and muscle that enabled you to get their SDK for free. It was GCC being free, and on DOS thanks to djgpp, that made it successful; and it didn't need corporate megabucks to do it.

taeric 4y ago
I think you are talking past me, though. My claim is that it took massive corporate bucks for Java to get inroads. Specifically because it was competing with some free options. Common lisp had nothing like that. Nor did Ada. Or... really, any other language? Microsoft did a pretty heavy push with C# and the general .NET ecosystem. Though, even they had to resort to destroying a lot if the VBScript world that had proliferated quite heavily by just being available on tools that folks otherwise had.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Java was free, too; and at the time, djgpp was effectively the only free c++ toolchain on DOS and Windows. Common Lisp wasn't even available to DOS and Windows users, let alone free or corporately backed. Even now every single free common lisp has substandard or outright broken Windows support. Common Lisp didn't bother to show up to the party. That's the first problem; it was priced terribly, when it did become usefully available.