
Dan Weinreb comments on Google's acquisition of ITA - hga
http://danweinreb.org/blog/rumors-of-ita-acquisition-are-just-rumors#comments
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herdrick
"I would not expect any new major software effort to be written in Lisp. On
the other hand, it’s not clear that ITA would have done that, either..."

So ITA (possibly) wouldn't choose Common Lisp again. I wonder if he includes
other lisps in that. And does he agree with ITA on that choice?

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Oxryly
"I would not expect any new major software effort to be written in Lisp."

How many companies have purchased companies whose flagship is developed in
Lisp only to shutdown or redo all Lisp work? WTF is this pattern? Is there a
name for it?

(and that doesn't count the companies that did it to themselves like Amazon)

~~~
hga
Perhaps fashion more than anything else.

Lisp was fashionable through sometime in the mid '80s or so, when it was
"officially" blamed for the failure of the over-hyped expert systems market.
(See a bit of that here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_sy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter#The_fall_of_expert_systems))

The biggest reason, of course, is what some have called the "de-skilling" of
IT. The vast majority of organizations view IT as a cost center, and they
(want to) view us as interchangeable cogs; this became critical when IT became
so big (say, starting in the '80s). Lisp goes very much against that
philosophy; as Dan notes, " _Acquirers of companies with Lisp software usually
make the big mistake of commanding that it must be rewritten in Java._ "

That's a language _explicitly_ designed by James Gosling for implementing
already fixed/solid designs and it fits very well into the humans as
interchangeable cogs mindset (not his fault, except in that C++ wasn't really
suited to that mindset and Java fixed the intractable problem with C++ for
that (manual memory management)).

PG and the failed C++ re-write of Viaweb might be an example of this, Yahoo is
said to be a place that doesn't attempt to hire the best engineers and that
alone is very telling.

~~~
herdrick
> The biggest reason, of course, is what some > have called the "de-skilling"
> of IT.

I don't buy that. There are countless software shops that are obsessed with
programmer skill and productivity, in fact live or die by it, and almost none
of them choose a lisp.

~~~
hga
De-skilling has nothing to do with that, it has to do with changing jobs so
that they require less skill. Assembly line factories are an example, they
were an efficiency improvement over individual craftsmen that not
coincidentally required much less skilled labor. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling> and
<http://www.google.com/search?q=deskilling+programming> and
[http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&f...](http://www.amazon.com/s?index=blended&link_code=qs&field-
keywords=deskilling)

Even then, in knowledge work you're obviously going to care about skill.

(Sure wish I'd believed a book on this subject (the deskilling of programming)
that I read in the '80s; knowing what a recipe for technical failure it is I
didn't. Unfortunately all too many suits believe it.)

~~~
herdrick
The most astonishingly skillful programmers use lisp more often than average
or crummy programmers, but it's still an unusual choice among them. Look at
the results of the ICFP programming challenges.

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hga
The 4th and 5th comments so far.

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bradleyland
Flagged because the content is outdated. There has since been an official
press release confirming the intent to purchase.

<http://investor.google.com/releases/2010/0701.html>

~~~
c1sc0
I think most people here are not interested in the main post but the comments
regarding Lisp.

