Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!newsfeed.pitt.edu!gatech!csulb.edu!news.sgi.com!nntp-hub2.barrnet.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news-in2.uu.net!world!wware
From: wware@world.std.com (Will Ware)
Subject: Re: Lisp is alive
Message-ID: <DyK4I0.HDK@world.std.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
References: <3052746344930826@naggum.no> <843831257snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> <3052849568663014@naggum.no> <843925667snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> <3052988043127294@naggum.no> <844074541snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 17:56:23 GMT
Lines: 25

I agree with Cybersurfer's contention that wider use of Lisp would be a good
thing. I'm also in a position of needing to do my work in C (luckily no
C++), on Unix boxes luckily. In my spare time I have been tinkering with
Scheme as a language in which to do molecular modeling. Scheme gives a good
tradeoff between rapid prototyping and speed.

Cybersurfer's point about tools is a good one. There isn't a GDB for Lisp or
Scheme. When I need to debug, I put in printf statements. At one point while
developing a GUI chemistry program I elected to switch from STk to MrEd to
make my program run on a wider range of hardware platforms, but there's a
wonderful little debugging feature in STk that MrEd lacks, where when an
error occurs, a window pops up with a collection of stack frames and you can
select a frame and use its variable bindings. This is a tiny fraction of what
you'd get with something like GDB; there's no way that I'm aware of to set up
breakpoints or watchpoints, or do single-stepping.

I would suspect that even elitists would benefit if Lisp/Scheme were widely
used. There would be a wider range of tools available, and there would be more
people to turn to for questions or general discussion. It would be easier to
get jobs writing Lisp, and nobody would be worrying about the language's
long-term viability.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Will Ware <wware@world.std.com> web <http://world.std.com/~wware/>
PGP fingerprint   45A8 722C D149 10CC   F0CF 48FB 93BF 7289
