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wasn't written by ONE person.

LOL. Two.

ADDENDUM: Oh, and his "point" is pointless. One person, two people, N people are meaningless distinctions. Besides, most Lisp projects that have any real success are group efforts as well, I'm sure. The REAL point is always the same: What are those projects? Where are they? How successful are they, really? I'll point it out as often as this article gets re-posted: When you compare C/C++ with Lisp based upon the only thing that matters, results, then Lisp is a near-complete failure. The applications that really matter, that people really use, that have real performance, that solve real problems, are written in C/C++/Blub, or some scripting language.




I actually make almost daily use of a social news site that's written in a Lisp dialect. The guy who wrote it had a prior success with Lisp. If you're interested email me and I'll send you the link.


Okay, Yet-another-digg-clone versus http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html

...and that list is woefully abbreviated.


Suppose we are traveling through a forest and come to a ravine. The drop is thousands of feet; so far away that we can't see who might have fallen to their death while attempting to cross. There are two bridges. One is a jumbled together mass of rotting boards and vines, the other is made of solid stone. We know that 500 people have crossed the rotting wooden bridge successfully, and know of only four who have crossed the stone bridge.

Which bridge do you think we should take?


Not exactly sure what you mean but my answer is:

Neither before also knowing how many people attempted to cross each bridge, so I know the success ratio for each.


Ah, so you're ready to change the argument to counting applications. Nobody's arguing that the count of Lisp applications is high. I'd only argue that the success stories are out there.


I see what you've done there.


Operating systems, the sort you're talking about, are fairly small. Students write them as one-semester projects.


it turns out that a lot of USEFUL projects require a group of people to complete. And when large groups of people work together for a long time they can write anything in C++ (if you have the time and resources you can always start by reimplementing Lisp).

But if i want to hack something together for my own purposes I dont have the time to do it in C.




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