From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Newbie questions [Followup to comp.lang.lisp] Date: 1999/05/07 Message-ID: <3135025319883397@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 474959504 References: <87btg5pb1y.fsf@2xtreme.net> <372dc20d.11142383@news.select.net> <37326ec5.11965212@news.select.net> <87g15ee8ss.fsf@foobar.orion.no> <372e265f.2137369@news.select.net> <87d80hdy1t.fsf@foobar.orion.no> <372fb91b.39706364@news.select.net> <87aevldw62.fsf@foobar.orion.no> <7gnhjt$p9q$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <4ogk0a72c.fsf@beta.franz.com> <37326dd3.5537740@news.select.net> <4KfY2.2160$Xs1.357331@news1.giganews.com> mail-copies-to: never Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Joachim Achtzehnter | There is a lot of research going on in the area of virtual types and | genericity. Don't be surprised to see a revision of C++ templates in the | future, or the emergence of a new language. In fact, the discussion | about adding genericity to Java has prompted a lot of activity in this | area of research. The point with all this is that languages that are | alive tend to learn from experience and improve over time. I tend to think of this in terms of young people who learn something that older people have known for decades. the world is getting increasingly complex, so the effort needed to get up to speed also increases and young people need to work harder to catch up. and when they do, they have a steeper "gradient" than the older people they catch up with, so it is only natural that they want to continue with their catch-up speed and go on to do new stuff at a higher pace than they think the old people do. that's why you find new languages picking up a lot of _experimental_ stuff that is "new" in some sense of the word, but which older people know to be junk, because it's something they discarded long ago, and people who catch up don't see where people retracked after going wrong, only where they went and decided to proceed. similarly, new languages will do a lot of "research" and get a lot of funding for concepts and ideas that have previously been discarded. however, to make this fly, they have to call it something else, the same way people who want to "circumvent" patents have to do _something_ clever on their own that lets them use somebody else's inventions. except that regurgitated research uses somebody else's money by fooling people who don't know that it didn't work the last time around. and with all these new languages and regurgitated research, progress is _actually_ moving a lot slower than it would have if people could just stick to using other people's inventions instead of optimizing for their own degrees and for funding fun research and publicity hunters. | I don't share your believe in the power of the market to lead us to | paradise. If the market had this power would Lisp be the fringe language | it is? Would Microsoft be the most successful software company? this is so mind-bogglingly over-simplified an attitude that I can't begin to answer it, but Microsoft has succeeded because it moved technical issues into _irrelevant_ positions. people do _not_ buy Microsoft's shitware because they want quality, robustness, investment protection, or the like, they buy it out of fear of not being able to keep up with the competitors for their manpower and with companies they exchange files with. Microsoft did, however, offer something of relevance a good number of years ago: they gave the suits a computer on their own desk that the computer people didn't control. _that_ was the relevant criterion that propelled Microsoft into their leading role in the minds of the people who decide life or death in business: the suits. like evolution, any irrelevant property can mutate without control, and some day it might prove to be relevant once sufficiently advanced. I read Kent Pitman's incessant argumentation for the "market" to be a strong voice to let the vendors know that certain issues are _relevant_ to their customers, because the market only decides what's relevant, the irrelevant is taken for granted, and can be _anything_ that doesn't get relevant one way or another. Kent's trying to influence that, and lots of people are trying to let people know what kind of irrelevant issues caused them to purchase virus distribution vehicles and security holes from Microsoft along with the relevant ego-stroking abilities for suits. #:Erik