3 ms·

As someone who started programming as a teenager in the 90s, Lisp wasn't on my radar until the mid-2000s. I think you have to acknowledge that regardless of wha

As someone who started programming as a teenager in the 90s, Lisp wasn't on my radar until the mid-2000s. I think you have to acknowledge that regardless of what the Lisp/academic scene had accomplished, these advances simply hadn't made it to mainstream development. To me, there's truth in the talk, because it mirrors what I experienced, although I know actual history to be different in the broadest sense. I know now about Scheme, Self, Smalltalk, etc, but it's clear they simply weren't exerting that much influence on early web developers or desktop developers of the time. I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I do think people are disagreeing with you simply because their experience is like mine. These concepts weren't truly novel when they went mainstream in the 2000s, but they were new to many.

harry8 12y ago
That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's probably so. But yeah, I wasn't there. Guy Steele is a genuine programming language expert who designed Scheme with Gerry Sussman, wrote the standard common lisp texts, the C reference manual and so on. "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, Java spec co-author http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html I'm not claiming expertise on Java, VMs, Lisp and programming languages in general and don't pretend to be. I've picked up that much but Mr Eckel hasn't. So does that fact that he has missed such a basic count for the expertise of this presentation on programming languages or against it? But maybe Mr Eckel has a lot friends who like to downvote any criticism of his presentation however reasoned and respectful? Maybe he's a lovely guy and mostly does a lot better? edit: minor spelling & grammar
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's probably so. But yeah, I wasn't there. Mostly on a few American companies. Lisp Machines were hardly known outside US. I heard about them at the university for the first time, in the mid-90's and I was already coding since the mid-80's. Also on the university I got to learn about Smalltalk, Prolog, Caml Light, Oberon, Modula-3. All languages with GC, some of them used for system programing which is still considered an heresy today. At least on my home country all those languages were considered esoteric by the average developer and seen as something that one is required to use while at university. I got to learn about them, because one of my focus at the university was in compiler design, so I got to read a lot about language design. The average programmer without a degree? Not so.
  - lispm 12y ago
    Depends were you lived. I was at an Universities with maybe 20 professor working on AI related stuff. There were a few Lisp Machines. But there were all kinds of machines which had commercial Lisp systems: the University had a site license for Allegro CL. There was LispWorks, MCL, Golden Common Lisp. Earlier there was Lisp on the DEC 10, the VAX 11/780 and 750s. Industry used Lisp in some projects. Philips medical research for example. Alcatel. BMW wrote applications in Smalltalk.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      In Portugal.
- lispm 12y ago
  The Steele quote was to a Lisp audience. They were a bit unhappy with the things. Lisp's performance was okay, but it did need a lot of memory in many cases (with a few exceptions). Whenever you developed serious with Lisp in the 80s and early 90s, you had the machines with the most memory around. Using lots of memory then was a delivery problem, because not only the applications were expensive, but also the hardware which was needed to run them. Memory was extremely expensive in the 80s. Java had some influence from Lisp implementations, but not so much from the virtual machine architecture. Virtual machines in software were not the focus of the Lisp world, which had lots of native code compilers. Smalltalk usually used a VM approach. Generally Java did not get much from Lisp anyway. Half-way is not true, maybe 10%. Steele worked for SUN because he was a language spec guy (he wrote books and specs). There were widely used VMs without GC and there were lots of systems with GC, but no VM.

harry8 12y ago

That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's probably so. But yeah, I wasn't there. Guy Steele is a genuine programming language expert who designed Scheme with Gerry Sussman, wrote the standard common lisp texts, the C reference manual and so on. "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, Java spec co-author http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html I'm not claiming expertise on Java, VMs, Lisp and programming languages in general and don't pretend to be. I've picked up that much but Mr Eckel hasn't. So does that fact that he has missed such a basic count for the expertise of this presentation on programming languages or against it? But maybe Mr Eckel has a lot friends who like to downvote any criticism of his presentation however reasoned and respectful? Maybe he's a lovely guy and mostly does a lot better? edit: minor spelling & grammar

pjmlp 12y ago
> That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's probably so. But yeah, I wasn't there. Mostly on a few American companies. Lisp Machines were hardly known outside US. I heard about them at the university for the first time, in the mid-90's and I was already coding since the mid-80's. Also on the university I got to learn about Smalltalk, Prolog, Caml Light, Oberon, Modula-3. All languages with GC, some of them used for system programing which is still considered an heresy today. At least on my home country all those languages were considered esoteric by the average developer and seen as something that one is required to use while at university. I got to learn about them, because one of my focus at the university was in compiler design, so I got to read a lot about language design. The average programmer without a degree? Not so.
- lispm 12y ago
  Depends were you lived. I was at an Universities with maybe 20 professor working on AI related stuff. There were a few Lisp Machines. But there were all kinds of machines which had commercial Lisp systems: the University had a site license for Allegro CL. There was LispWorks, MCL, Golden Common Lisp. Earlier there was Lisp on the DEC 10, the VAX 11/780 and 750s. Industry used Lisp in some projects. Philips medical research for example. Alcatel. BMW wrote applications in Smalltalk.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    In Portugal.
lispm 12y ago
The Steele quote was to a Lisp audience. They were a bit unhappy with the things. Lisp's performance was okay, but it did need a lot of memory in many cases (with a few exceptions). Whenever you developed serious with Lisp in the 80s and early 90s, you had the machines with the most memory around. Using lots of memory then was a delivery problem, because not only the applications were expensive, but also the hardware which was needed to run them. Memory was extremely expensive in the 80s. Java had some influence from Lisp implementations, but not so much from the virtual machine architecture. Virtual machines in software were not the focus of the Lisp world, which had lots of native code compilers. Smalltalk usually used a VM approach. Generally Java did not get much from Lisp anyway. Half-way is not true, maybe 10%. Steele worked for SUN because he was a language spec guy (he wrote books and specs). There were widely used VMs without GC and there were lots of systems with GC, but no VM.