Using Lisp to beat your Competition

[Andrew Maizels]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> 
> In article <3AF01D77.27AC4D3 at one.net.au>,
> Andrew Maizels  <andrew at one.net.au> wrote:
>                         .
>                         .
>                         .
> >languages (Java, C, C++).  It isn't a "silver bullet", but it can speed
> >up the development process as much as 5 times.
>                         .
>                         .
>                         .
> That's the narrow-sense development process, where
> employed programmers only spend ten hours a week of
> their time anyway.  The rest goes to figuring out
> hardware failures, planning lunch destinations,
> tracking down what happened to all the bandwidth
> someone just ordered, learning about the latest
> corporate reorganization, ...

Yes and no.  If those 10 hours of actual coding now produce 50 hours
worth of results, overall productivity goes up by a factor of five
anyway (measured in terms of LOC, function points, whatever).  I've seen
that happen. 

On the other hand, if the programmer now spends 2 hours per week coding
and an extra 8 hours vacuuming the cat, it doesn't help so much.  I've
seen this happen too.

Andrew.
-- 
There's only one game in town.
You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't quit the game.		-- The four laws of thermodynamics.