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Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
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Date: Mon, 10 Oct 1994 10:07:18 +0000
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In article <CxBFyD.3CD@festival.ed.ac.uk>
           jeff@festival.ed.ac.uk "J W Dalton" writes:

> Why does CLOS not support this?

CLOS doesn't support dealing off classes. I don't know why this
can't be done in an implementation, tho. The difference could be
that Apple are pushing this as a _language_ feature. At least,
that's the impression I got from the Dylan Manual.

> I meant compared to Lisp.  The parser s.b. simpler than one for C++.

I don't have the option of programming professionally in Lisp.
I do have that option in C++. I'd like to have that option in
Dylan, esp with the code shared at the class level.

> Sometimes the GUI is part of the problem.  I'm all for having some
> Lisps w/ fancy GUIs, but there should also be some alternatives.

If you ignore the GUI, then the problem is a small one. However,
almost all the programming jobs I see, that I could do, are for
Windows and C++. I wish that was Windows and Lisp, but it isn't.
(Never mind why, that's just the way it is, where I'm sitting.)

> People used to say things like this: you can learn Lisp in a
> day, or three if you know FORTRAN.  (That's more or less a
> direct quote from the Eclisp documentation -- anyone ever
> encounter that beast?  It was for DG Eclipse machines.)

I've not heard of Eclisp before, so I can't comment on that.
 
> What books is that?  Still in print?  I'll get one if so.

Functional Programming in Hope, Roger Bailey, ISBN 0-13-338237-0.

> I *used* to understand what new programmers were like, but if
> all this talk of hardware models is true they may have changed.
> My encounters w/ new programmers were a number of years back.

I'm continually suprised at what new programmers will think.
When I look at most language tutorials, I'm very disappointed,
esp if it's one for C. The C tutorials I've seen tend to have
the worst examples of programming that I've ever seen outside
the pages of Elements of Programming style, which is a book that
teaches good programming by taking bad examples from other
tutorials, and then improves them. If anyone were to write a
modern update of EoP, it wouldn't be hard to find enough examples!

I've seen some Lisp tutorials that have bad examples in them,
also. Perhaps I just have a liking for practical code, and an
odd belief that _no_ code is to "trivial" not to need to be
written well. Today's throw-away code used by just one user, who
is also the programmer who wrote it, is tomorrow's application
with 100+ users.

So I'm told, anyway. Most of my code is only ever used by me,
and I find I can use for it for years before I need to replace,
so the above statements are my personal experience, coupled with
the the experience of some other programmers.

Perhaps most other programmers throw away their "trivial" code
and re-write it, when it turns out that more than one users wants
to use it? I don't know, but it's not the impression I get.
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