From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:02 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth! In-Reply-To: References: <20180216011815.GD8295@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 8:56 PM, Lawrence Stewart 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 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 > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: