Re: Y Store now C++

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

> Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 08:38:42 -0500
> From: Daniel Weinreb <DLWeinreb@attbi.com>
> 
> Paul Graham wrote:
> 
> >A friend of mine (who's probably on this list, actually)
> >went to interview there in about 2000.  He said they told
> >him they didn't need Lisp hackers, because they were going
> >to port the Store Editor to C++.  Why?  Because they didn't
> >think they'd be able to find Lisp hackers.
> >
> Yes, this is the flip side of the network-effect, the negative feedback 
> loop.
> Languages are a winner-take-all (of course actually I mean "a few winners
> take most") thing because of the network effects. And in light of the state
> of Lisp these days, I expect there are fewer and fewer people getting Lisp
> experience. I don't know, perhaps Gnu Emacs and Autocad are generating
> some trained Lispers, and a few universities, although to stretch the 
> net that
> far involves talking about more and more different dialects.
> 

Well, *lots* of universities teach scheme in their first CS course.  I
consider that "lisp experience".  This is part of the grass-roots effort
that is (IMO) the only way to get real acceptance of advanced languages.
Five years from now, when people who took scheme in CS 1 have graduated and
are working in industry, some of them will stumble across problems in java
or C++ and say to themselves "this was so easy in scheme; we'd just use a
closure".  Then they'll start playing around with languages that support
closures in their free time, maybe choosing one of them as a scripting
language to use with their work, and suddenly industry is using more
advanced languages.  Of course, the key to the success of this is to not
tell your boss what you're doing ;-)

Mike