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From: moroz@inist.ru (Oleg Moroz)
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
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Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 00:10:26 GMT
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On Fri, 21 Feb 1997 20:33:40 GMT, rsrodger@wam.umd.edu (Robert Rodgers) wrote:

>schauer@zeus.gmd.de (Holger Schauer) wrote:
>>Use the right tool for the job. Nobody said that Lisp should be
>>the language of choice for every single application on the world. I
>>don't know if word processors or stuff like Excel should be written in
>>Lisp. Nobody would try to build Word in Perl, would they ? I just read
>>about Corels Office Paket in Java which must be unacceptebly slow
>>(though it's just a beta version, perhaps this will change).
>
>It's laughable, even for Corelware.
>

Well, I tried the beta of Corel Office for Java. It's buggy, it lacks many
features, but under the decent JITted JVM (such as Microsoft one) it's not much
slower than their native version (Corel was always known for fat slow code...).

And writing those monster office suites in Lisp or something like that is not
laughable to me. First, GNU Emacs is (mostly) written in Lisp and most people
like its performance. Second, when you write a sufficiently large system, the
size overhead of Lisp runtime becomes negligible, even w/o using modern
treeshakers and such. And third, we can get the inter-application interfaces
(inside the suite) and a built-in extension language essentially for free.

Oleg
