Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: franz.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to franz.com.

Comments · 183

  1. Re:A plea to all up-and-coming language designers by voodoo1man · · Score: 1 · on Prothon - A New Prototype-based Language
    Does Common Lisp lend itself easily to kernel, systems, or real-time programming on mass-market computer architectures?
    (Operating System) Kernels? Sure (there's been more than a few projects over the years). Systems? It's a programming language, after all. Oh, you mean highly complex, interactive models of real-world processes? I don't know too many people who are not using Lisp doing that sucessfuly (no, seriously, there really haven't been too many systems like those described in the link period, and most of those were aborted or had failed miserably). Is music performance real-time enough? If not, maybe you'll find robotics fits the bill. When did the Lisp Machines start making a comeback? All those applications run on regular PCs (with the exception of the robots of course).
    I know that the developers of a popular PS2 game have disclosed that the game's business logic is written in Lisp
    Naughty Dog have developed all of their PS1 and PS2 games (mostly) in Lisp; I didn't know this was a secret. But, a video game's business logic? Man, you need to stop sniffing the Sharpies with the guys from the marketing department.
    but would one want to write a 3D engine or a cellphone game in Lisp?
    There are a few projects doing 3d games in Lisp (but so far I haven't seen anything in terms of purdy screenshots). The CAD and animation packages in Lisp have shown that it's certainly possible to get good 3d performance (Izware's Mirai has the fastest IK/FK solver for skeleton constraints I have ever seen anywhere - the closest competitor in terms of features, Sega's Animanium, is about four to five times slower (in terms of minimum system requirements for interactively solving a ~two-dozen bone human skeleton - Mirai can do this on a 200Mhz PPro with 192M of RAM; Animanium needs at least an 800Mhz PIII with 256M of RAM). I don't know of any Lisp implementations that support cell phones, so I guess you're out of luck until the cell phone companies start offering Lisp (you're pretty much limited to their supported platforms if you want to develop cell phone games).

    PS - in a recent dick-measuring benchmark (the "Coyote Gulch" floating-point ephemeris calculator), CMU Common Lisp and Steel Bank Common Lisp produced code 5% faster than GCC on a Pentium IV. The participants claim it was "an hour-or-so's work".

  2. Re:Not sure this is what we need by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative · on Beyond An Open Source Java

    Sure.

    Common Lisp

    ANSI Common Lisp standard (X3.226-1994)

    Popular commercial implementations:

    Allegro Common Lisp
    Xanalys Lispworks
    Macintosh Common Lisp
    Corman Common Lisp

    Popular free implementations:

    CMUCL
    CLISP
    Open MCL
    SBCL
    GCL

    All of these implement the Standard, some better than others. All have interesting extensions which are not portable. All bring different elements of interest to the table of developers looking to solve different problems.

    Perl and Python haven't for whatever reason needed to be forked to provide a better implementation for a specific market segment. While large applications are being written in these languages, they're obiviously not in environments where the demand on the engines is high enough to warrant someone funding a fork and a port. (say, Perl for Palm, or Embedded Python, or Enterprise Ruby, whatever -- there is no complete "Python Compiler", for example, that I'm aware of at least). Though ActivePerl et al should be acknowlegded.

    BEA has JRockit which is its own JVM, though it may well ship Suns class library. They felt that they wanted a better JVM to meet their markets needs better than IBM and Sun were.

    Put an implementation to work and the market will fork it as necessary. Just ask MS.

  3. Re:While this may sound... harsh by __past__ · · Score: 2, Interesting · on International Workshop on Interpreted Languages
    That's why languages with paradigms that don't translate well onto von Neumann-y notions (eg, LISP or Prolog) are interpreted as a rule.
    I don't know much about Prolog, so let's look at current popular Common Lisp implementations: As for programming constructs introduced by Lisp and other high-level languages, no need to refer to obscure things like the Boost Greenspun^WLambda library. How about garbage collection, recursion, symbolic computing, or conditionals? (Lisp was the first language to have an "if"-like construct, before that it was all FORTRAN-style computed GOTOs)
  4. Symbolics PDA.... by njord · · Score: 2, Funny · on Credit Card Sized Concept PDA from Citizen

    This is the fevered dream of a romantic, but I'd pay money to see a Lisp-based PDA. An actualy Lisp Processer isn't necessarily what I mean; a powerful commercial or a free and powerful Lisp interpreted for x86 (or any von Neumann) processor would be okay. What I want is for it do have a Genera-like OS that can be re-written in real-time. Man, that would rule.

    Ain't gunna happen, though. Unless someone wants to pay me to write it for the PDA of their choice.

    Also, it should have a Canesta projection keyboard. I saw them at siggraph, they rock!

    njord, Lisp sympathizer

  5. Metaobjects? by Kakemann · · Score: 1 · on Prevayler Quietly Reaches 2.0 Alpha, Bye RDBMS?

    Can anyone explain to me how on earth it is ACID compliant from the user's viewpoint?

    I think the real solution to the DB/OOP problem is somthing like this.
    That is - modify the object system itself to support transparent database access. Doing this, you'll be able to write the rest of the application pretty much without worrying about the database backend.

    -K

  6. Re: Warning: Knucklehead by hding · · Score: 1 · on Phillip Greenspun: Java == SUV

    And to amplify, plenty of companies use Lisp internally and don't talk about it too much. The customer lists at:

    Franz

    and

    Digitool

    should be ample evidence of that.

  7. Re:Warning: Knucklehead by 11223 · · Score: 4, Informative · on Phillip Greenspun: Java == SUV
    Again, no further comment, except to note that no one, I mean no one in business computing considers using Lisp.
    Your ignorance is astounding. No, I'm not going to cite some obscure example. Instead I'm going to point you at the Franz "Success Stories" site at http://www.franz.com/success/. Read through all the categories. Then realize these are just the people who thought it worth $10k to use Franz's Allegro Common Lisp. Also see all the applications that Xanalys develops with their LispWorks product.

    AMD also uses GNU Common Lisp and ACL2 internally, though they can't reveal any specifics - this is of course the problem with a language that's suited well for the research and development part of the product phase. Who wants to give away what they're doing just to advertise that they're using Lisp?

    Of course, if you wanted pretty pictures and "yet another database web interface", try the Stargreen site. But you won't find a lot of people using Lisp on those, for the simple reason that most of that work is cut and paste from a previous project.

  8. business computing with Lisp by brlewis · · Score: 2, Informative · on Phillip Greenspun: Java == SUV

    Who do you think keeps Franz and Digitool in business? Hobbyists? I don't think so; they'd be using one of the free implementations. Your "no one in business computing considers using Lisp" comment shows you don't know what you're talking about.

    I myself use Scheme in my employment, and it's helped a lot.

  9. Re:Bad Kool-Aid. by mrdlinux · · Score: 2, Informative · on Does C# Measure Up?

    I don't know why the OP mentioned Lisp macros, because they certainly have nothing to do with the backend of a Lisp compiler. However, problems still do exist with compiling to IL, mostly focusing around calling-conventions and potential limitations instituted by the CLR.

    For example, Common Lisp has advanced object-oriented features such as multiple-dispatch methods and method combination, and this would most have a large conceptual mismatch with the typical calling conventions used by languages in IL, hence the CL compiler would need to use its own calling conventions and would be incompatible with other languages (thus defeating the point of IL).

    Same goes for memory layout, stack management, etc... all due to Common Lisp's advanced data types and capabilities such as multiple-inheritance, CHANGE-CLASS, resumable conditions...

    As far as I know, all real Common Lisp compilers that support Windows have not yet made any serious steps towards adding an IL backend, since there is very little benefit to be gained until those issues can somehow be worked out. Franz, in particular, put out a list of roadblocks a few years ago, but I do not know what became of it.

    Scheme, on the other hand, has call/cc which requires heap-allocated stacks. This has been a sticking point with Scheme on JVM; the Schemes there simply do not support the full call/cc as a result. JVM is very limited with what the call-stack can do, for "security" reasons. I imagine CLR has similar issues, unless someone clever found a way around it.

    In general, the problem of an ideal "Universal Intermediate Representation" for all languages, so that only one backend is needed per platform, has been extensively studied for probably 30 years and I do believe the conclusion so far is: it's not possible.

    I highly doubt that Microsoft has beat out academia in this regard.

    As for your other statement regarding various languages and their supported paradigms, I would like to clarify something:

    C, Basic, Pascal, Fortran, and Cobol are not regarded as functional nor object-oriented languages. I highly recommend you consult the definitions of said terms. In addition, I would not count the following as object-oriented languages, in an ideal world: C++ and Java, due to their mostly static (and pain-in-the-ass) nature.

    (Hint: functional language means higher order functions and closures)

  10. Re:I thought Java was doomed by __past__ · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Programming Wireless Devices With Java 2
    What's the fastest runtime for Python? Can it translate to C code?
    Nope, it goes directly to machine language. Plain old CPython with Psyco, that is.

    My personal quest has been for a productive, portable language that's efficient enough for high-end gaming applications.
    Try Lisp. No, seriously. Think GCs and (native-code) compilers with 40 years of optimization, together with a really high-level, productive language. See this example where it seems to have worked quite well.
  11. FSF's interpretation are not very relevant by reynaert · · Score: 3, Insightful · on LGPL is Viral for Java
    The FSF's interpretation of the LGPL only applies to software owned by the FSF. If I had a different interpretation of the LGPL (which is certainly possible -- many parts are quite vague), that interpretation would apply to my software, and the FSF can do nothing about it.

    One example of one such non-standard interpretation is the "Lisp LGPL", used by Franz for their open source libraries. Parts of the LGPL don't make much sense for non-C-like languages such as Common Lisp, so they added a preample which explains their interpretation.

    Another real-world example is Pine. Early versions of Pine had a BSD-like license, which allows "modification and distribution". The University of Waterloo interpreted this to mean that you could modify Pine, or distribute an unmodified Pine, but not distribute a modified Pine. This was contrary to everybody else's interpretation, but they owned the copyright so they got to decide. (More recent versions have a different license).

  12. FSF's interpretation are not very relevant by reynaert · · Score: 3, Insightful · on LGPL is Viral for Java
    The FSF's interpretation of the LGPL only applies to software owned by the FSF. If I had a different interpretation of the LGPL (which is certainly possible -- many parts are quite vague), that interpretation would apply to my software, and the FSF can do nothing about it.

    One example of one such non-standard interpretation is the "Lisp LGPL", used by Franz for their open source libraries. Parts of the LGPL don't make much sense for non-C-like languages such as Common Lisp, so they added a preample which explains their interpretation.

    Another real-world example is Pine. Early versions of Pine had a BSD-like license, which allows "modification and distribution". The University of Waterloo interpreted this to mean that you could modify Pine, or distribute an unmodified Pine, but not distribute a modified Pine. This was contrary to everybody else's interpretation, but they owned the copyright so they got to decide. (More recent versions have a different license).

  13. Re:Great Quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative · on Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

    > Personally, I love LISP.

    Amen to that.

    > If only there were good UNIX API bindings for it,
    > and a good graphical toolkit...

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkits. [PUBLIC DOMAIN LICENSE, Native compiler with kickass code-generator.]

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkits. [Commercial, free personal use, great IDE and GUI editor, kickass code generator, database, object system, etc, etc. This is the stuff dreams are made of, best development environment I have ever had the pleasure to use.]

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkist. [Commercial, free for personal use, relatively affordable, best GUI toolkit (native look and feel on all supported platforms.)

    If that isn't enough for you. GNU Clisp runs on more platforms than a flaming wazooka. Don't be bothered by the interpreter (most Lisps are compiled btw, and NOT interpreted as legend has it.) Clisp is FASTER than the stuff you find in your /usr/bin (Python, Perl, TCL or whatnot.) Clisp has a C interface (like most other Lisps, including the ones above) which lets you link to any shared/static library which has a C interface (almost all Unix software.)

    There is also Corman Lisp which is strictly Windows for now. This beast has direct access to Win32 API and COM objects.

    - Kumade Khawi

  14. Re:Great Quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative · on Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

    > Personally, I love LISP.

    Amen to that.

    > If only there were good UNIX API bindings for it,
    > and a good graphical toolkit...

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkits. [PUBLIC DOMAIN LICENSE, Native compiler with kickass code-generator.]

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkits. [Commercial, free personal use, great IDE and GUI editor, kickass code generator, database, object system, etc, etc. This is the stuff dreams are made of, best development environment I have ever had the pleasure to use.]

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkist. [Commercial, free for personal use, relatively affordable, best GUI toolkit (native look and feel on all supported platforms.)

    If that isn't enough for you. GNU Clisp runs on more platforms than a flaming wazooka. Don't be bothered by the interpreter (most Lisps are compiled btw, and NOT interpreted as legend has it.) Clisp is FASTER than the stuff you find in your /usr/bin (Python, Perl, TCL or whatnot.) Clisp has a C interface (like most other Lisps, including the ones above) which lets you link to any shared/static library which has a C interface (almost all Unix software.)

    There is also Corman Lisp which is strictly Windows for now. This beast has direct access to Win32 API and COM objects.

    - Kumade Khawi

  15. Re:Great Quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative · on Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

    > Personally, I love LISP.

    Amen to that.

    > If only there were good UNIX API bindings for it,
    > and a good graphical toolkit...

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkits. [PUBLIC DOMAIN LICENSE, Native compiler with kickass code-generator.]

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkits. [Commercial, free personal use, great IDE and GUI editor, kickass code generator, database, object system, etc, etc. This is the stuff dreams are made of, best development environment I have ever had the pleasure to use.]

    Lisp has good UNIX API and good GUI toolkist. [Commercial, free for personal use, relatively affordable, best GUI toolkit (native look and feel on all supported platforms.)

    If that isn't enough for you. GNU Clisp runs on more platforms than a flaming wazooka. Don't be bothered by the interpreter (most Lisps are compiled btw, and NOT interpreted as legend has it.) Clisp is FASTER than the stuff you find in your /usr/bin (Python, Perl, TCL or whatnot.) Clisp has a C interface (like most other Lisps, including the ones above) which lets you link to any shared/static library which has a C interface (almost all Unix software.)

    There is also Corman Lisp which is strictly Windows for now. This beast has direct access to Win32 API and COM objects.

    - Kumade Khawi

  16. Re:Steep pricetag by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on EiffelStudio 5.3 for Linux

    For that much money, you can get a REAL development environment, instead of a little "designer" toy.

    Eiffel had the shortest moments of fame in "over hyped programming language" history. It had the backing of a corporation (albeit an small one) and shipped with a best selling, Jolt award winning book. But made no difference, and all that is left of it, is "Design by Contract", which is NOT a language feature but a programming style.

  17. Don't believe the hype by MeerCat · · Score: 3, Insightful · on The Post-OOP Paradigm

    First: yeah, right because XP (et al) re-writes OO: pair programming, early delivery, RAD, iterative development etc are different ways of running a life cycle, not different ways of structuring your model of a domain.

    Second: this reminds of when the K boys did a big rant about "I prove OO is flawed because if you have a class Person and derive from it Customer and Staff classes then you break stuff when a staff member quits his job and walks into the shop and buys stuff as you need to get the object to mutate classes". They claimed to instead invent "OO++" (they called it that). The correct OO answer is that you've got a poor design, you need to revisit it (and aspects or attributes or roles as concepts may help you think about this), but that doesn't break or replace OO (ie straw man argument).

    Now meta-programming, such as the (now rather old but still a head-fuck for those who program in one language only) Meta Object Protocol is the direction that I see code structure moving: more Lisp-like structures and flexibility to change your object protocol on the fly, losing strong typing as a fundamental mechanism for OO, these are ways to let you manipulate the larger level structure of your code whilst keeping the lowest level of syntax constant . You let people write their OO code as they like, but as an over-coordinator you can suddenly change the way inheritance works, or the way method-dispatch works to get different effects. It's what I like about Perl (which is making me realise what all those Lisp hackers were raving about for so long, but I prefer the pragmatic approach of perl over the rather purist lisp).

    --
    T

  18. Re:Lisp... by hding · · Score: 2, Informative · on The Hundred-Year Language

    Well, for starters I'd look here (make sure to look at the links in the navigation bar on the left) and here.

  19. A barrel of random thoughts... by VFVTHUNTER · · Score: 2, Insightful · on Red Hat 9 To Be Released March 31

    Redhat seem to have forgotten that many people won't use a *.0 release...now I've got to wait till October to upgrade my 7.3 box :(

    Also, many commerical apps - for instance Franz's Allegro CL, which I use all day - won't support 9.0 for a while (they've just got around to supporting 8.0 this month).

    Doing this to be at the same number as Slack??? Why not just switch to a sideways 8 and be done with that lame sort of one-upmanship already?(yeah, you're right - Volkerding would release "Slackware Infinity plus 2" - so then you'd release "Redhat Infinity plus Infinity").

    Finally, a note to the RH people reading (bero-RH used to respond to all of my posts here on /. , but you guys kind of terminally pissed him off):

    WTF is up with Metacity?

    You put a window manager on your distro that doesn't even have a webpage? Many of us loyal RH users had gotten quite used to Sawfish. So used to it, in fact, that I had used GIMP to create many of my own themes.

    So I was unpleasantly surprised, upon installing 8.0, to find that you guys had once again skipped a version number. What were you thinking? Didn't you you guys learn anything from the gcc-2.96 fiasco? (read the very bottom of the page). With 8.0 you've done it again - SF's sourceforge site has the most recent version at 1.2, yet somehow something named sawfish-2.0 made it into your distro. I frankly wouldn't care if your "2.0" worked; but whatever genius in NC decided to "upgrade" it forgot to also upgrade the sawfish-themer. The problem is that you also changed your entire font structure, so that SF2 barfed at my TTF bankgothic fonts. And then I had no themer to change it. Editing theme.jl by hand is a pain.

    Now don't get me wrong. Metacity is a great WM. The fact that it uses XML is quite cool. And Havoc is a great programmer. But the fact that you switched WM's on us, and switched to essentially a wholly undocumented WM (there are pages now but none at release and really few for the first few months) is unacceptable.

    Now I've kind of gone off on a tangent here, but I'm using a simple example to illustrate a very important point: Whomever is making the UI decisions at RH needs to stop it. I submit to you that some software companies do this thing called research - they find out what their users are using, and then make their products acceptable to them. Yeah, I know, I'm one of few people who customizes his own saw themes. So at this point I will also remind you that with 8.0 you took the terminal icon off of the desktop and the menubar and hid it 3 or 4 levels deep in the menu.

    And a litany of other things - my point is that each release should have me sighing relaxing sighs of "Oh, this is nice," but instead every April and October I find myself feeling ever more uncomfortable and having to re-learn your entire distro. And don't tell me this is "innovation" - I know progress when I see it, and this isn't it.

    On a better note, for the day or two that I did use 8.0, the fonts were beautiful - if you guys can hurry up and create an upgrade that I can live with, I'll love you for it.

  20. Re:well done... by voodoo1man · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Another .NET Language
    10 to 15 different languages? They can't even get an exact number, much less say what they are (and how closely they're related).

    At the very least, they didn't even bother looking at Common Lisp - Franz took a look at the CLR several years ago and decided that it wasn't even worth the trouble. It is impractical to get CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System - multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance, generic functions, and completely dynamic (you can re-define a class at runtime, and all the instances, and subclasses, etc. will be converted according to either a default or user specified method the next time they are accessed)) implemented with any sort of efficiency. Closures and dynamically generated lambdas (anonymous functions that capture a lexical environment and plain vanilla anonymous functions, created at runtime, respectively) seem to present a similar sort of problem from what I know of the CLR (I understand that they'd have to be represented as objects, please correct me if I'm wrong).

    I've heard other similar objections to the inadequacy of the CLR when it comes to dynamics languages, and overall I'm not terribly impressed with what Microsoft is doing or how it is going about it (the seemingly primary reason why .Net has/will have Scheme implementations from both Northwestern and PLT is because of rather large grants).

  21. JiL - java in lisp ... compiles to the jvm by ep385 · · Score: 2, Informative · on The Future of Java?

    Here's another language JiL that compiles to Java Byte Codes. It's a language that's better than Java but worse than Common Lisp, so it kind of sits there in the middle.

    It allows Java programmers to get around one of Java's biggest weaknesses - the lack of a macros.

    http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/doc /jil.htm

  22. Re:What good are functional languages? by hding · · Score: 2 · on X# Functional Programming from Microsoft?

    Then you probably want links like Franz success stories, or perhaps this from ALU. Or Digitool. And of course these are just Common Lisp references; you can surely dig up similar things for other languages as well.

  23. Re:Perhaps.... by __past__ · · Score: 4, Informative · on How Would You Improve Today's Debugging Tools?
    Given that functions like "invoke-debugger" are part of the Common Lisp standard and hence every program can expect to be able to call them whenever it feels like it (although not much about how the debugger is supposed to work is standardized, for obvious reasons), yes, it usually ships with a Lisp app.

    The standard image shipped with CMUCL is about 20 MB on my FreeBSD box. This contains the whole standard library, including the compiler, debugger, profiling and tracing tools, embedded documentation (docstrings attached to functions/variables available programatically, like Python also has now) etc. To that, you add your own code, either as external libraries that get linked at runtime or integrated in the image - you load everything you wrote in a running image, both code and possibly data, and dump its state, so you don't have to re-load it on startup.

    It is possible to get rid of functionality, but I doubt it's frequently used. 20 MB for the runtime system are not too much, compare for example with a Java runtime environment (or a basic Unix system, that could be regarded as Cs runtime).

    Some commercial Lisps, for example Allegro Common Lisp support a more "conventional" way of delivering apps, as standard executables without the need for a runtime. Given that Franz charges higher license fees if you want to include the compiler/debugger in your app, I guess there is a way in ACL to get smaller executables.

    Yet another option is compiling to C, and use standard OS tools like GCC for the final step. Gnu CL and Embeddable CL support this. There is still less difference between the development/production environment than one would think: They also use plain .a/.so libraries to load compiled lisp code when you work interactively.

  24. CLIM by __past__ · · Score: 3, Informative · on Interoperability Between the GUI and the CLI?
    A lot of Lisp applications used to use CLIM, the Common Lisp Interface Manager. It integrates command line and GUI style interaction naturally - it is based around "presentations" of the objects in your program, i.e. whenever you "present" something as either text or an icon or whatnot, it remebers what it is, and the output can be used as input for other functions, be they called by name at the command line or, for example, as a menu entry.

    The symbolics Lisp Machine user interface was based around this. For an impression of it looked like and worked, look at this movie. CLIM is available for the two major commercial Lisp implementations from Franz, Inc. and Xanalys; there is also a free implementation in the works. Here are some relevant links.

  25. Re:what's it good for? by auntfloyd · · Score: 4, Informative · on SmartEiffel 1.0 Released

    and it's still one of only a few compilable languages (excepting gcj == java) that have a gc.

    There is nothing special about a "compilable language" (whatever that means) using GC. Lisp has been doing it for decades (and yes, most Lisp systems are native code compilers, such as CMUCL, Allegro, CormanLisp, SBCL, etc). Oberon-2 compilers use GC, including the open source OOC and Oberon System3 from ETH. Ada was designed such that GC could be implemented, but it rarely is. Many FP languages use GC, such as Haskell. Haskell compilers, such as GHC, NHC, and HBC all use GC.

    If you haven't gotten the point yet, there is nothing special about implementing languages using garbage collection, and furthermore, there was nothing innovative when Meyer decided to use it for Eiffel.

  26. Re:Don't use Fortran 90. by auntfloyd · · Score: 2 · on Is FORTRAN Still Kicking?

    Some posts further down recommend interpreted languages like Python and LISP (jeez!) for such applications. They must be joking.

    Lisp is not an "interpreted language" (if there even is such a thing as a *language* which needs to be interpreted). In fact, most open-source Lisp systems, as well as all commerical Lisps are compiled into native code.

    I find it hard to believe that many people seem to think that after 40+ years of existence, Lisp is still interpreted, as if Lisp users, developers, and researchers were incapable of doing any better.

  27. Re:One significant disadvantage to FORTRAN by paulwomack · · Score: 1 · on Is FORTRAN Still Kicking?

    the overwhelming simplicity to FORTRAN leads to simple-minded implementations

    Very important comment; here's an extreme example to demonstrate the point.

    BugBear

  28. Common Lisp by looie · · Score: 1 · on Is FORTRAN Still Kicking?
    CL may be worth a look.

    Franz has some case studies of high-end solutions with CL.

    more info can be found at XANALYS Lisp Works, which includes this comment:

    "Advanced numeric types. The Common Lisp arithmetic package includes unlimited size integers, fractions, complex numbers, and a complete floating point library. Conversion between numeric types occurs automatically."

    mp

  29. Re:voluntary dos by Jon+Howard · · Score: 1 · on RIAA Smacked by DoS

    Quick criticism of this code:

    #!/bin/sh

    while true
    do
    wget http://www.riaa.com -nc -r -l 0 -k -nH -o/dev/null -O/ dev/null &
    done

    I'd recommend removing the "&" from the wget line.. you'll run way too damn many procs if you detach each one. It's more sensible to let one finish before starting the next. Oh, and the "-k" is a waste, no need to convert links, wasting your valuable processor time, if you're not saving the output. If you don't think that's aggressive enough, add a "sleep 1" after the line ending with the "&" and you'll spawn a new one every second, whether or not the previous one finished yet. It could still cause you to overflow with procs, but it's a little nicer, and it'll take a hell of a lot longer to do so.

    Anyway, just my 2 cents, I'd write something in Lisp to do it with more grace. Oh, and check out Lisp. ;)

  30. Alicebots for websites: Pandorabots/iMortalportal by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2 · on N.Y. Times Magazine Chats With ALICE Bot Creator

    If you visit iMortalportal.com, you can create a web-based alicebot with your own customized personality. There's a more flexible, though less aesthetically-refined interface to the same content available on Pandorabots.com.

    As an added bonus, these sites are powered by my favorite programming language - Lisp, specifically Allegro Common Lisp.

    Look forward to the Oddcast powered bots in the near future (now available via Pandorabots' site)

  31. Modern programming language: Lisp by Jon+Howard · · Score: 1 · on Latest IE Hole Lets Gopher Root You

    I personally am a big fan of Lisp, especially Franz's Allegro Common Lisp. The Lisp kernel automatically does handy things like protect against buffer overflows, and allows for debugging and modifying a running program - all of which is optional if you want to get sheer speed out of it.

    Pretty handy, shame that so many people think Lisp is too old, ACL is quite modern and highly optimized - Lisp has undergone a lot of maturation over the last 50 years. Take a look at the list of links in my journal and see some of the things people are using Lisp for nowadays (AMD, Sony, Nasa, even Microsoft).

  32. Re:Sales culture is to blame by Jon+Howard · · Score: 1 · on Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?

    Has anyone stopped to ponder why it is that people are so readily stereotyped?

    I don't know about you guys, but I am not defined by my job - my job is selected based on some conjunction of the skills I currently hold or wish to develop further. Consequently, the behaviour I manifest when doing my job is not decided in advance for me by the common culture of that job but by my understanding of how to best accomplish the goals that the job entails. Perhaps the distinction is that I don't ask how to do my job, but what my boss expects me to accomplish - then I work out the rest to the best of my abilities.

    On that same note, I'm not a white man in the USA, I'm a free individual who happens to be male, caucasian, and living in the US of A. Some people would argue that there's no difference, I merely extend the idea that it's a matter of priorities: what labels do you treasure most, and how does that affect your thinking and behaviour?

    ...Back to the idea of performing my job without referring to the instruction manual: A common trend in business is to micro-manage through bureaucracy - many positions come with a manual which is intended to help maximize efficiency by ensuring that employees are as disposable as the time it takes to train them. Consider the cost of making your life less difficult by simply following instructions: you can always be instructed to be replaced; much like a VCR, the instructions from one employer are not likely to be applicable to another. You only benefit from the enhanced ease if you do everything you can to stay at one job, if you're layed-off it's a whole new load of training when you're hired elsewhere.

    In other words, don't be lazy and avoid stereotypes.

    (by the way, I've been working at Franz, Inc. for almost 1 year now. I love it, the whole office is friendly, I learn something new every day, and even though I've been sick for weeks, everybody's supportive and helpful. Here's to hoping we can all find a group of folks as great as they've been to me.)

  33. Re:Which decent games are written in lisp? by jaoswald · · Score: 2 · on C

    I don't know about decent games (Abuse had a Lisp engine), but systems to develop games certainly have been written in Lisp.

    I would suspect that the best breakpoint for run-time efficiency is to have a C or assembly language rendering engine, with Lisp-based game action code. I.e. the dynamic portion that has to be easily changed is in Lisp, the part that has to smash data into registers as fast as possible would be in C or assembly. Of course, commercial Lisps typically have provisions for a Lisp-syntax expression of assembly code, so you can write assembler using Lisp macros...

  34. Consider Common Lisp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?
    Your requirements are all delivered by most commercial Common Lisp systems, and even some of the opensource ones.

    I've just recently finished researching the available CL implementations, and their relative merits and for my needs Franz Inc's) Allegro CL product was most appropriate, but there are other offerings from Xanalys and the opensource CLISP and CMU-CL to consider as well.

    Please do post what your eventual decision is, it'd be useful for some of us to understand your decision making factors.

  35. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  36. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  37. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  38. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  39. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  40. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  41. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  42. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  43. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  44. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  45. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  46. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  47. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  48. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  49. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information:

  50. Re:Who cares? Language wars are over by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2, Informative · on What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

    Here's a categorized list of companies successfully using Allegro Common Lisp, along with a couple examples from each; follow the links for more companies and more information: