Re: Y Store now C++

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   (c) Even then, they had to drop some features (involving
   advanced uses of closures).
I'd be curious to know what these were.

   > ITA, the other alleged Lisp success
   > story.. also says much the same thing.. they don't really use Lisp
   > except for certain key things, 

   Using a language for these "certain key things" is exactly what 
   it  means to "really use" it.  
That's ok, and I'm well aware of it. One production application we
sell uses 6 langugages precisely because of that.

What I'm trying to point out that platform considerations by
enterprise IT directors entail looking precisely at the costs
associated with maintaining integration points .. between those "key
things" and everything else they have to maintain. In any system
written in multiple languages, it has been my experience, that those
are sometimes the most fragile.

   > and the rest of the stuff is wired in C
   > to prevent consing effects (I could have this wrong, so someone can
   > jump in and correct me). We (at Ascent) use Lisp too, but our db, and
   > X access is done thru Forth! Why do you think history is replete with
   > people trying to re-write working code (see what happened at Ars
   > Digita :) .. and don't give me that "people are stupid" argument
   > again!

   Kind of hard to answer that question without it...
Here I was..  thinking that perhaps I'd get some people to think :) 

   > I therefore would venture that the so-called "advanced" languages are
   > not so advanced after all.. if they force you back to "assembler days"
   > to solve these other problems that they view as peripheral to their
   > mission. And frankly -- I think we have enough new languages as it
   > is.. 

   And we have enough theorems too, presumably?

Well, I must admit I don't see the analogy here. I guess I should have
been a bit less controversial (after all this is ll1 :), what I meant
to say was more like: I have no problem w/ new languages, it's just
that I think people could also work fruitfully extending/fixing
existing ones (hence my suggestion for CL2 below -- if you have
trouble with starting off w/ Common Lisp, I don't care -- I know of
your work w/ Arc for example -- what I'm trying to ask for is a
platform-related question, not a language-related one).

   > why not just take Common Lisp and *fix* it! 

   Do you have any idea how long the future is?  Do you really
   think people in 1000 years want to be constrained by hacks
   that got put into the foundations of Common Lisp because
   a lot of code at Symbolics depended on it in 1988?
I have a very precise idea of how long the future I care about is.
It's precisely the time left in my working life. 1000 years --
computer languages.. gee. Beyond my ken. Sorry. (Personally I don't
think of computers or software as *that* important in that time scale
-- I have other candidates but I don't want to go too off topic here :)

So what are the hacks that constrain you in Common Lisp -- that you
couldn't fix within the language?