Subject: Re: free lisp compilers?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/09/03
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3145366895717308@naggum.no>

* Friedrich Dominicus
| This is an opinion and not a fact I guess.

  not just opinion, but the evidence is anecdotal, not fundamental.  the
  reason it doesn't sound unreasonable to me, and in fact sounds reasonable
  is that when you need, say, 5 times as many programmers to handle the
  amount of work necessary, you get interaction costs and team overhead
  that slows everybody down to a quarter of their top speed alone.  but you
  can hardly _do_ C++ work alone, except for fairly small things, like
  three to six months.  if you were to spend 15 to 30 months like that,
  you'd have really a hard time.  a Common Lisp programmer can get the
  system working in a short time, learn a lot from and develop the software
  with its users when it's still quite malleable.  that's too hard to do in
  C++, so you also spend more time designing the system before-hand.  all
  of this means more time and the demand to get it coded and deployed means
  more programmers, which means more team interaction overhead.  all of
  this really adds up.

| And maybe you underestimate the C++ programmers.

  (1) you can't underestimate C++ programmers.  (the snotty version ;)

  (2) no, but you can't hire top-notch C++ programmers for projects like
  this.  top-notch C++ programmers generally develop fundamental stuff like
  libraries and interface tools, not applications.

#:Erik
-- 
  save the children: just say NO to sex with pro-lifers