What Made Lisp Different (2002)

Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by rerx on Sunday February 18, 2018 @02:54PM (#16407972)

Paul Graham's Viaweb was rewritten in C++ and Perl after the aquisition by Yahoo. I can imagine that this was easier to deal with for a large team than the original implementation in Lisp.

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by lispm on Sunday February 18, 2018 @03:12PM (#16408167)

That's not unusual, historically some software had prototypes in Lisp. Some managed to get into production. Some even proved very hard to replace.

But that was at a time when more people learned Lisp, there was less choice in tools and the eco-systems were smaller. In the 70s/80s one could buy ten years into the future with the right hardware/software and government/military was financing.

Take for example the Connection Machine CM 1, an early massive-parallel computer with 2^16 processors. It was initially developed largely for and with Lisp. You could program it in *Lisp from a Lisp Machine - one of the most expensive co-processors. Fortran and C was added then for certain commercial users. Very expensive stuff and at least ten years ahead.

Today the landscape looks different.

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by copper_think on Sunday February 18, 2018 @08:20PM (#16410082)

The garbage collector for Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR -- the VM for .NET) was written in Lisp originally and then transpiled into C.

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by erikj on Sunday February 18, 2018 @09:22PM (#16410318)

Also, Apple's Interface Builder began its life as a Lisp program: http://vimeo.com/62618532

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by lispm on Monday February 19, 2018 @04:10AM (#16411696)

Postgres started as a Lisp program, and turned out to be too difficult to develop in a mix of C and Lisp.

The Objectstore database was developed by former Lispers, who wrote an earlier object-oriented database in Lisp.

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by mark_l_watson on Sunday February 18, 2018 @10:02PM (#16410456)

+1 for mentioning my friend Denny. I wrote an application that Experteliigence sold for me - lots of fun. Expertelligence had a high talent density.

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by flavio81 on Monday February 19, 2018 @07:47AM (#16412524)

>I can imagine that this was easier to deal with for a large team than the original implementation in Lisp

You can bet this was simply due to lack of Lisp developers at Yahoo. And I can bet that the Lisp code was easier to read.

I once delivered a sophisticated pricing modeler to a financial institution, in Python, done mostly in functional style. Code well documented and commented, and easy to understand. And Python is one of the easiest languages to learn.

The customer's IT deparment insisted on a complete rewrite to Java, because that's what their developers knew.

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Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002) by deepaksurti on Sunday February 18, 2018 @03:09PM (#16408131)

>> C++...this was easier to deal with for a large team

This was safer for pointy haired bosses :)

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