From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Promoting Lisp Date: 1998/11/03 Message-ID: <3119091487182988@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 407929416 References: <363E21EA.1554B0C6@digaudio.com> mail-copies-to: never Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Gregory Santos | With my qualifications, how can I help achieve this? I would suggest acquiring a commercial Lisp development environment, and develop tools to help create your other software, instead of using Perl and shell scripts and such, and as you get more experience, use Lisp to "think", while you might still deploy in some other language. it is not glorious work, but it _will_ give you a lot of experience just coding stuff up and working with Lisp code. this will help you figure out which of these things you find easier to do with Lisp. if among them you find a task for which Lisp is particularly well suited, you have also gained the ability to argue for this to your peers or managers or clients or whatever, and so that could be your first real project and showcase. take it from there. note that this does not make Lisp "mainstream" for others, but it does make Lisp "mainstream" for yourself, and I think anybody who wants to make a change needs to start with himself. it is also very frustrating to wait for others to make the necessary difference first. BTW, the purpose of using a commercial Lisp environment is to gain solid experience with the stuff it provides above and beyond Common Lisp and which turns out to be necessary to developing Common Lisp applications. my favorite environment is Allegro Common Lisp from Franz Inc, which comes in a free Trial Edition for Linux. (I don't recommend IDE's and the like because I have never seen any good programmers who have grown up on them (or even on Windows in general) -- most such programmers are _extremely_ lazy and unwilling to do what it takes. I keep looking for good programmers constantly, and the ones I have found are not mainstream nor do they use mainstream tools or languages. this should not really come as a surprise to anyone.) #:Erik -- The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?