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From: papresco@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Paul Prescod)
Subject: Re: Theory #51 (superior(?) programming languages)
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Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 23:55:11 GMT
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In article <MPG.d66f272a9b8d59c989696@news.demon.co.uk>,
Cyber Surfer <cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>With a mighty <x6d8ucfgqd.fsf@ds9.border.com>,
>oz@border.com wibbled into the void...
>
>> > I wonder what $40,000,000 spent on marketing might do for Lisp?
>> 
>> a brief perusal of computing history would convince you that much more
>> than this was directly or indirectly spent on lisp, through academic
>> and commercial research and development funding on AI and years of
>> government grants. lisp has had as much or more funding and hype
>> as any other deserving or undeserving part of computing. 
>
>How much of that money was spent on marketing? If Lisp has been hyped
>more than C++, then I must've been reading the wrong magazines. I've yet 
>to see a full page commercial for a Lisp system, and yet I see many pages 
>devoted to C++ every month.

I think that the average programmer thinks procedurally. No amount of money
is going to convince him or her to spend the intellectual effort to figure
out how to express their problems recursively, or using higher order functions;
especially if their "problem" is handling mouse clicks and sending messages
to windowing "objects" or databases. You can use Lisp as if it weren't a
language designed to implement the lambda calculus, but is it really 
competitive as a Better Basic than Basic? Not if you are learning from a
traditional Lisp text.

So my call is no: Microsoft could not make Lisp fly through sheer force of
will and cash, unless they turned it into Basic, or worse, "Visual Basic".

 Paul Prescod

