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From: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka)
Subject: Re: GNU Extension Language Plans
In-Reply-To: Tom Christiansen's message of 22 Oct 1994 04:16:20 GMT
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Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 00:29:41 GMT
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In article <38a3mk$lr8@csnews.cs.Colorado.EDU> Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com> writes:

   Furthermore, you cannot in some miraculous wink of an eye catch up to the
   hundreds of thousands of manhours of testing and refinement that those
   languages which you (or more properly RMS, I should probably say) hope to
   supplant have undergone.  You must commit a commensurate investment of
   time and trauma to reach a similar level of sophistication.  And even
   thought this should be done, nevertheless it will inevitably suffer from a
   sinister onus of mistrust analogous to that suffered in the initial
   releases of Solaris, one which to a not inconsiderable extent persists
   still, irrespective of any measure of its technical merit.

By this argument, Tcl and perl and etc. should never have been
invented, because any of several languages in the Lisp family would
have served the purpose much better, and have exactly the hundreds of
thousands of human-hours of experience you cite.  Unless you have
recourse to unawareness as an explanation.

My point is that your argument can always be used as an excuse =never=
to introduce new technology, because the old has so much experience
behind it.  But sometimes that experience is precisely the obstacle
that is now preventing further progress.
--
        Lawrence G. Mayka
        AT&T Bell Laboratories
        lgm@ieain.att.com

Standard disclaimer.
