From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross)
Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth!
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:02 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEoi9W4Z2Pg0mVGSZq6-38-nSQLk+7S1gzhxNHUGBwuC9qW8_Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <F607EBF3-08FF-433A-9C2D-353A54DFDBED@serissa.com>
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On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 8:56 PM, Lawrence Stewart <stewart at serissa.com>
wrote:
> ITA’s airline flight booking system, that was used by Orbitz and others
> was pretty much entirely written in Common LISP, and it was certainly both
> large and commercially successful. Orbitz was bought by Google for $700
> million. I don’t know how much of the LISP survived sustained attention by
> Google.
>
Google bought ITA, not Orbitz. Most of the logic in QPX is still in Common
Lisp, but it's not what you'd call "idiomatic" CL code. If one reads a
bunch of Paul Graham and Peter Norvig books and then gets onto QPX with the
expectation of that sort of elegance, you end up pretty unhappy pretty
quick. They do a lot of things very differently to squeeze as much
performance as they can out of what has, historically speaking, been a
fairly mediocre compiler.
- Dan C.
Paul Graham’s company Viaweb was all LISP. It was bought by Yahoo! for $50
> million and became Yahoo! Store.
>
> I think of myself as a systems person and C is still my primary language,
> but I wrote the routing software for the wacky Kautz graph in the Sicortex
> machines in Common LISP. It was substantially easier! After it worked I
> recoded in C for production. It isn’t that Common LISP isn’t perfectly
> fast enough, we just didn’t want garbage collection at that level of the
> software.
>
> My favorite LISP story is the time I was hired to evaluate a proposed
> Cryptosystem. I was handed 40 pages of C code. I reimplemented it in 15
> (short) lines of Common LISP. It wasn’t hard to crack after it fit on one
> page!
>
> I came to LISP 30 years late because I was in 6-1 at MIT rather than 6-3
> so I didn’t learn LISP or Scheme. I am not one of the awesome folks of
> which you speak, but I’ve met them and know what you mean. One MIT
> physicist I met thought MILC was too complicated so his quantum
> chromodynamics code was in LISP. He wrote his own LISP->C translator to
> get it to generate exactly the code he wanted.
>
> -L
>
> > On 2018, Feb 15, at 8:18 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 07:51:14PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> >>>> Worth mentioning one significant exception: the Lisp family.
> >>
> >> So anyway...some of you who were there, was there cross-pollination? Was
> >> Franz Lisp a thing Unix people at Berkeley played with, or was it mostly
> >> Lisp people who just happened to be using Unix because VAXen were
> expensive?
> >
> > This is just my opinion so there is a grain of salt. Or a salt shaker.
> >
> > I think there are two (at least) sorts of programmers, the systems people
> > and the lisp people. Sometimes you get both kinds in the same person
> > but that tends to be rare (and awesome, I've employeed several of those,
> > they were magic).
> >
> > I'm a systems guy. I've played with lisp, even wrote a tiny lisp
> (haven't
> > we all?), tried to get to like it and utterly failed. All sorts of smart
> > people I knew in my career loved lisp, sneered at any other language,
> > tended to think in ASTs, etc, etc. I definitely felt inferior and tried
> > to like lisp but just never got what was so neat about it.
> >
> > For good reason, I think. Nobody has written a serious operating system,
> > or a serious $BIG_PROJECT in Lisp. Not one that has been commercially
> > successful, so far as I know. I know there were attempts but all those
> > attempts failed. Why? Performance I think. C performs far better even
> > though it is, in the eyes of lisp people, far more awkward to do things.
> >
> > I can't tell you the number of times I've heard "If we were using Lisp
> > we'd be done by now". 100's, 1000's. What I have never heard is "I
> > recoded this pile of C in lisp and it's 10x faster".
> >
> > I think the thing is that lisp programmers were optimizing for speed
> > of coding and C programmers were optimizing for speed of execution.
> >
> > So I suspect that Franz Lisp was mostly lisp people who happened to be
> > using Unix. But I wasn't at Berkeley so what do I know?
> >
> > --lm
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-02-16 2:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 53+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-02-14 21:06 Dave Horsfall
2018-02-14 21:12 ` Clem Cole
2018-02-14 22:15 ` George Michaelson
2018-02-14 23:37 ` Dave Horsfall
2018-02-14 21:24 ` Toby Thain
2018-02-16 0:01 ` Dave Horsfall
2018-02-16 0:51 ` Dan Cross
2018-02-16 1:06 ` Clem cole
2018-02-16 3:10 ` Toby Thain
2018-02-16 13:36 ` Clem Cole
2018-02-16 1:18 ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 1:55 ` George Michaelson
2018-02-16 1:56 ` Lawrence Stewart
2018-02-16 2:38 ` Dan Cross [this message]
2018-02-16 2:41 ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 2:51 ` Dan Cross
2018-02-16 2:56 ` George Michaelson
2018-02-16 2:51 ` [TUHS] Clueless programmers - was " Toby Thain
2018-02-16 2:55 ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 10:26 ` [TUHS] " Tim Bradshaw
2018-02-16 1:25 ` Ian Zimmerman
2018-04-24 0:59 ` Ian Zimmerman
2018-04-24 3:26 ` Dave Horsfall
2018-04-24 4:31 ` Dan Stromberg
2018-04-24 13:42 ` Clem Cole
2018-02-16 2:09 ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-16 2:31 ` Toby Thain
2018-02-16 10:01 ` Tim Bradshaw
2018-02-16 12:10 ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-16 12:37 ` tfb
2018-02-16 13:34 ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-16 14:07 ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-16 20:13 ` tfb
2018-02-16 3:17 ` Dan Stromberg
2018-02-14 23:19 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2018-02-14 23:31 ` Dave Horsfall
2018-02-15 17:32 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2018-02-15 19:18 ` Ian Zimmerman
2018-02-15 20:56 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2018-02-15 21:31 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2018-02-15 2:30 ` Nemo
2018-02-16 2:19 Noel Chiappa
2018-02-16 2:48 ` Larry McVoy
2018-02-16 4:19 ` Steve Nickolas
2018-02-16 11:27 ` Tim Bradshaw
2018-02-16 15:45 ` Nemo
[not found] <mailman.1.1518746401.1018.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2018-02-16 2:40 ` Paul McJones
2018-02-16 13:42 Noel Chiappa
2018-02-16 21:02 ` Tim Bradshaw
[not found] <mailman.22.1518790085.20342.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2018-02-16 17:40 ` Paul McJones
2018-02-16 19:24 ` Bakul Shah
2018-02-18 20:50 Norman Wilson
2018-02-19 0:28 ` Dave Horsfall
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