BIG successes of Lisp (was ...)

[Paul Rubin]

mike420 at ziplip.com writes:
> a. AFAIK Orbitz frequently has to be shut down for maintenance
> (read "full garbage collection" - I'm just guessing: with
> generational garbage collection, you still have to do full
> garbage collection once in a while, and on a system like that
> it can take a while)

I'm skeptical that's the reason for the shutdowns, if they're using a
reasonable Lisp implementation.  

> b. AFAIK, Yahoo Store was eventually rewritten in a non-Lisp. 
> Why? I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you :)

The Yahoo Store software was written by some small company that sold
the business to some other company that didn't want to develop in
Lisp, I thought.  I'd be interested to know more.

> c. Emacs has a reputation for being slow and bloated. But then
> it's not written in Common Lisp.

Actually, Hemlock is much more bloated.  However, Emacs's reputation
for bloat came from the 1 mips VAX days, when it was bigger than less
capable editors such as vi.  However, compared with the editors people
run all the time on PC's nowadays (viz. Microsoft Word), Emacs is tiny
and fast.  In fact if I want to look in a big mail archive for (say)
mentions of Python, it's faster for me to read the file into Emacs and
search for "python" than it is for me to pipe the file through "more"
and use "more"'s search command.

> Are ViaWeb and Orbitz bigger successes than LATEX? Do they 
> have more users? It depends. Does viewing a PDF file made
> with LATEX make you a user of LATEX? Does visiting Yahoo
> store make you a user of ViaWeb? 

I missed the earlier messages in this thread but Latex wasn't written
in Lisp.  There were some half-baked attempts to lispify TeX, but
afaik none went anywhere.

> For the sake of being balanced: there were also some *big*
> failures, such as Lisp Machines. They failed because
> they could not compete with UNIX (SUN, SGI) in a time when 
> performance, multi-userism and uptime were of prime importance. 

Well, they were too bloody expensive too.

> Another big failure that is often _attributed_ to Lisp is AI,
> of course. But I don't think one should blame a language
> for AI not happening. Marvin Mins ky, for example, 
> blames Robotics and Neural Networks for that. 

Actually, there are many AI success stories, but the AI field doesn't
get credit for them, because as soon as some method developed by AI
researchers becomes useful or practical, it stops being AI.  Examples
include neural networks, alpha-beta search, natural language
processing to the extent that it's practical so far, optical character
recognition, and so forth.