Re: Industry versus academia

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Yes, I agree that it doesn't have to be this way.  One approach is to 
provide tools
that take care of a lot of "plumbing" and "boilerplate".  This (I hope 
you won't think
this is supposed to be a plug) is what the BEA Weblogic Workshop (WLW) 
product is
trying to do for Web Services in a J2EE environment.  It's also one of 
the things
Visual Basic is about. You could say that WLW is trying to make Java and 
J2EE
"lightweight", in some senses in which the word "lightweight" has been 
used around
here, by providing tools rather than by changing the langauge.

I think a lot of discussion here has impinged on the point that just as 
you miss a lot
of you consider a language without considering its libraries, you also 
can miss a lot
when you consider a language without considering its tools.  The main 
answer that
real Lisp people will give to the "what about all those parentheses" 
question usually
includes some mention of text editing tools that help with the parens 
and turn them
to your advantage.  That's one example.

Anyway, if you have other approaches to solving the below-mentioned 
problem, you
may have something that will interest big commercial consumers of 
software such as
financial and telecomm companies.

Sundar Narasimhan wrote:

>>Well, it depends a lot on what problems you mean by "such end-user 
>>problems".
>>    
>>
>I was referring to the foll. from your post (it doesn't have to be
>this way). 
>
>--
>have a real problem that really hurts them: too much of the software 
>work that they
>want done requires too high a level of skill sets.  They cannot get 
>applications written
>fast enough because they cannot find or cannot afford the kind of 
>wizards needed to
>write such applications.  They need to get things set up so that they 
>don't need so
>many wizards.  Please note that someone who is less than a wizard does not
>deserve to be called "dumb"; there's plenty of room for being quite 
>intelligent
>without being a system programming wizard.
>
>  
>