RE: Icon

[Scott McKay <address@hidden>]

At 04:41 PM 12/20/01, Anton van Straaten wrote:

>Add historical reasons, and economic reasons, to that list.  Related to both
>of these, is legacy code.

Ah, this is off-topic, but what the heck.  Just delete it.

It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory, but I think there is a strong
economic incentive against large companies like Microsoft using good
languages and tools.  If they use poorer languages and tools, then
they can use them in their armament of excuses for why they ship
relatively crummy software whose quality improves only slowly.  The
incentive to continue this practice is that they get to ship ever more,
and ever larger, releases of their software, which their customers
get to pay for again and again.  This is great for companies like MS
because it guarantees a revenue stream.  And it's great for companies
that produce CPUs, memory, and disks, because the ever expanding
software requires ever expanding hardware resources, requiring people
to upgrade their hardware every few years.

I think it's worth trying to do language design, but the economic forces
are *huge*, even if you don't buy the above "emergent conspiracy".
Even if it is good for nothing else, Linux shows how economic forces
can be undermined...

----------
It's amazing for me to remember just how much functionality we put
into Lisp machines 15 years ago, machines which typically had about
10 to 12 megabytes of memory and 300 megabytes of disk, which
typically held a couple of "world loads", big paging files, and a file
system.  And the same goes for Xerox D-machines, which were,
I think, even smaller.  (I still use my c. 1990 Lisp machine at home
to do real work, and it doesn't even feel like a nostalgia exercise.)