On Apr 20, 8:13 pm, TimDaly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<SNIP>
Hi Tim,
> > There are rumblings but *definitely* no specific plans to remove
> > lisp or maxima.
>
> Lisp has already solved a lot of the problems Python has yet to
> face.
Sure, but how about reading "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win
Big" from 1991 at http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
While I disagree with the author on many points, i.e. calling Unix bad
names and so, the interesting comment is:
"The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system
and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C+
+."
How prophetic ;)
>But since that discussion is a prelude to a language war I'll end it here.
Well, this isn't about a language war, i.e. $FOO is better than $BAR
at solving some programming problem. This is fundamentally about the
lisp ecosystem, i.e. how viable is the Open Source lisp tool world.
And I have build numerous lisp implementations on a wide range of
platforms and compared to building C, C++, Fortran compilers or Python
itself there are numerous problems. I have often said that your whole
ecosystem cannot be viable if your fundamental tools are hanging on by
a thread.
After I posted about *my* intention to make clisp disappear from Sage
in the long term at alt.sci.symbolic William and I got in a long off
list discussion with Fateman about Maxima, Axiom, Sage and lisp in
general. Among the point Fateman made about me pointing out that
building lisp from source sucked were:
He never had to build lisp from source, so what is the problem?
That is so short sighted it isn't even funny, i.e. water comes out of
the spout, electricity is supplied by the socket in the wall. And I
can only say the the Open Source lisp community is far behind on its
tools and since it has been decades where the situation has either
stagnated or gotten worse I don't see much of a future there. Compare
the vitality of the "lisp machine" vs. gcc, compare the support gcc
experiences by companies like Apple and IBM which are very interested
in it succeeding. Where is the lisp support? lisp in itself is no
better or worst than Python and assuming one is a master at a given
language one will likely will write a "better" program than a n00b or
bad programmer in a competing language.
In the end it all boils down to platform support and I see ecls as the
silver bullet here for Sage+lisp. I am porting Sage to Linux/PPC 64
[PPC 32 works] and Linux/Sparc[32|64] at the moment and once we get
access to AIX runnning on Power64 I will also port Sage to it. I have
even been thinking about porting it to OSX/ARM, i.e. the iPhone. We
have started on the Sage/MSVC 32 and 64 bit ports to Windows. In each
of those cases clisp will be a pain to deal with. ecls could fill the
gap and I would personally throw a huge effort in making sure ecls
does build and work on all of those platforms and all platforms Sage
already supports assuming Maxima would work with it. So, the ball is
in your court.
Cheers,
Michael
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