Subject: Re: Where's your Lisp software, Janos Blazi?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001 19:25:51 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3208965951547384@naggum.net>

* Tim Moore
> Maybe there is; after all, I'm not even a teacher.  However, from my own
> experiences in grad school I think I can assert that it will always be
> much less of a hassle to use open source software for exposition and
> research purposes than closed source.  At a certain point "closed-source"
> can not be used widely before it stops becoming closed source.

  I find this a very strange problem.  I have not actually been involved in
  securing funding for commercial projects myself, but I have worked on
  several, including some medical projects that had absolutely no problem
  working with the industry.  On the contrary, they had to fight them off
  and had to set up ethics committees and kinds of things to _avoid_ being
  associated with industry.

* Erik Naggum
> How much of a Common Lisp system do you expect to be written in Common
> Lisp?

* Tim Moore
> From my experience, anywhere from "a good part" to "almost all."

  That is not my experience.  The parts that provide services outside of
  the standard are so much larger than the parts that implement Common Lisp
  and in order to implement them, you need access to system-specific code,
  which means you have to use functions that cannot be expressed in Common
  Lisp.  That is, if you recursively search for all called functions or
  methods and you stop at any function or method defined in the standard,
  there will be a relatively small number of functions that terminate this
  search with _all_ standard Common Lisp functions or methods.

///