I should add that I have also had a terrible customer service experience at Best Buy, although not related to any amusing money.
In response to a complaint about returning a VCR that was DOA, in which I was entirely polite and calm, a young punk clerk lost his mind and actually threatened me with physical violence. Unfortunately, he backed off when I quietly informed him that I didn't think he'd enjoy that experience. I guess he had mistaken us for a bunch of defenseless old people (late 40s to 60s) who could be bullyed and intimidated. His manager was not the least bit apologetic.
We used to buy lots of electronics and appliances there, but of course we don't shop at any Best Buy any more. Since that incident a couple of years ago, I've heard several other people spontaneosly relate very similar stories about this very same store, located in Watertown, Mass. This seems consistent with the overall poor customer service stories about Best Buy that you hear on the net.
I am another weirdo who likes to use $2 bills. Some cashiers have seen them, some haven't, but I've never had any actually refused. Sometimes you get a strange look for a moment. I have had Sacagawea coins refused, though (because they really didn't think they were money, not because they were inconvenient).
The Xerox "Star" (aka the 8010) with the wastebasket on the desktop came out in 1981. (The prototype, which had mouse, windows, and icons, was called the "Alto", and dates from 1973 (I used the Alto little bit around 1980; I don't recall it having a true desktop, though.)
It's amazing that anyone commenting on this stuff would be unaware of the well-documented history of these innovations, how Apple got them from Xerox, etc. There have even been PBS television specials about it!
In the cited Washington Post article, George Tenet is quoted referring to network vulnerabilities, security standards, risk management, improving the security of consumer software, and concerns about protecting the national infrastructure.
Nowhere is there any mention of eliminating anonymity, invading privacy, or limiting access to the Internet, except vaugely in one sentence that contains no quotes and seems to have been invented by the reporter, Shaun Waterman.
Apparently George Tenet, who is not a Government official, wants to improve security (and thereby, your privacy) in order to protect against threats to the network. I think that might be "controversial", as he puts it, because it would place higher standards on those who create network software for corporations (companies like Microsoft, SUN, and IBM). I wonder what Shaun Waterman wants?
Re:Lisp is great. Where is Lisp?
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
Common Lisp is an ANSI standard language with many compatible implementations and is available on all the popular operating systems and processors. Some of those implementations are free and/or open-source, if that's important to you. So I would tend to disagree with your statement, "There is no portability".
If someone just says "Lisp", they are generally assumed to be referring to ANSI Common Lisp.
There are several other dialects of Lisp in popular use, such as GNU Emacs Lisp, and AutoLISP (AutoCAD), but those are not compatible with Common Lisp. Those particular dialects are application extension languages, not intended for general-purpose programming.
There is also Scheme, which was originally conceived as a dialect of Lisp (over two decades ago) but which is arguably not really a Lisp. Anyway, it is quite different from Common Lisp.
Your explanation that since most XML applications are written in Java, Python, or Perl -- Lisp must not be standard or portable -- doesn't seem logical to me. For one thing, most applications in general (XML or not) are not written in Lisp, but that does not mean that "there is no such thing as Lisp" as you put it. By the way, what happened to C++ in that list?
I can't actually find anything in your message that makes any sense at all.
The implementations from Franz and Xanalys do include network programming facilities.
One nice thing about Java (and to a slightly lesser extent, Perl) is that it comes with a wealth of standard libraries. The situation with Lisp is not very good in that respect. Whilte Lisp has many or most of the libraries you'd wish for,it's harder to find them and they are less standardized. The Lisp community is actively working on seriously improving that situation.
Lisp machines were expensive workstations that cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver performance that, even at the time, could easily be had for a few thousand dollars.
The Lisp Machine was the first commercially available workstation: the first machine you could buy that had such revolutionary features as high-res bitmapped display console, mouse, window system, high-powered processor, large disk, huge address space, and local area network. This was at a time when your personal computer options were Z80, 8086, or Apple II; however, this machine competed in performance with the PDP-10 or maybe VAX-11/750 (if you had one to yourself). The cost was originally around $70,000 per seat, which was considered quite reasonable. When other workstations were invented and some of the costs came down, the pricing was reduced competitively. By the time price/performance was an issue, it was all over anyway, for entirely other business reasons.
For those who are not familiar with the Lisp Machine: it was a proprietary processor and architecture designed for high-performance Lisp computing in a personal workstation format. (The word "workstation" had not yet been invented.) It was invented at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory around 1977, and was commercialized by several spin-off companies about 1980. The entire operating system and everything was written in Lisp.
Contrary to popular claims, the programming environment has some serious limitations, including lack of source level debugging (eventually it got added, but only after the system had already fallen from grace).
You are making some very strange assertions, there. I don't know about "popular claims", but I could point you to the documentation. During the early-mid 1980s, these machines were considered the Cadillacs of workstations (compared to the new SUN, Apollo, etc. machines that were coming out, and compared to mini/mainframe systems from DEC and others).
They supported Lisp, and also many other languages (such as FORTRAN and ADA), and did most certainly have source-level debugging since the beginning. Many of the techniques that are common in today's advanced programming and debugging environments were pioneered on the Lisp Machine, and there are many useful debugging features that are still not available in today's C/C++/Java environments.
There's a lot more history here that I could expound upon. The Lisp Machine companies eventually failed, and there are many opinions and extensive analysis of why that happened.
I wouldn't say that it was a simple matter of price/performance, however. The last thing that the major Lisp Machine company did, however, was to finally port the system to conventional hardware (DEC Alpha, sigh). But by then it was too late for the company to survive.
It sure as hell was not due to a lack of features!
I would take issue with many of your other claims, as well, but this is enough for one message.
I am curious what system interface was missing or unsuitable for you in Lisp.
You mentioned threads, but all the commercial Lisp implementations include threads. (In some implementations, they are implemented using the underlying native OS threads, while in others, the threads are entirely internal to Lisp.) In Lisp, the facility is usually called "processes" or "multiprocessing", which is a slight terminology glitch. Lisp has had threads since about 1979, and the interface is very easy to use. What Lisp implementation were you using, and what problems did you have?
Lisp also has a very flexible system for dealing with filenames portably across operating systems, and it has the stream-oriented IO facilities. Most implementations also include interfaces to the network, either at the sockets or higher level.
And, of course, you can always just program using the operating system's facilities (by using the "foreign function call" facilities).
I think Lisp vendors are pretty interested to know what OS interfaces you think are missing. What exactly was the problem that you had?
Lisp continually evolved since its genesis in the 1950s, and major improvements and developments in many areas (such as IO, macro facilities, object-orientation) were made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Things have come a long way since Lisp 1.5.
By the 1980s, only about half a dozen schools in the country were even vaugely abreast of the developments in Lisp, and not very many books (or even manuals) were available until around then. So it's not surprising that your exposure to Lisp was about an obscure historical language.
Even today, I suspect that many or most teachers are still uninformed about what's in Common Lisp. Most of the requests for help with homework that I see on the Internet are oriented towards list processing. While Lisp is obviously good for that sort of thing, it suggests that students are not taught about how to use Lisp for what it's true value is: writing large, complex, evolvable systems.
The commercial Lisp implementations from Xanalys and Franz, at least, have bindings to proprietary GUI toolkits that are programmed at fairly high levels. The Xanalys toolkit is called CAPI, and is portable across Windows and Unix.
There is also CLIM, which is a standardized, cross-platform, very high-level GUI system; this is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac. There is currently an effort to create a free implementation of this.
There are others, but I haven't used them.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to buy lots of electronics and appliances there, but of course we don't shop at any Best Buy any more. Since that incident a couple of years ago, I've heard several other people spontaneosly relate very similar stories about this very same store, located in Watertown, Mass. This seems consistent with the overall poor customer service stories about Best Buy that you hear on the net.
I am another weirdo who likes to use $2 bills. Some cashiers have seen them, some haven't, but I've never had any actually refused. Sometimes you get a strange look for a moment. I have had Sacagawea coins refused, though (because they really didn't think they were money, not because they were inconvenient).
The Xerox "Star" (aka the 8010) with the wastebasket on the desktop came out in 1981. (The prototype, which had mouse, windows, and icons, was called the "Alto", and dates from 1973 (I used the Alto little bit around 1980; I don't recall it having a true desktop, though.) It's amazing that anyone commenting on this stuff would be unaware of the well-documented history of these innovations, how Apple got them from Xerox, etc. There have even been PBS television specials about it!
In the cited Washington Post article, George Tenet is quoted referring to network vulnerabilities, security standards, risk management, improving the security of consumer software, and concerns about protecting the national infrastructure.
Nowhere is there any mention of eliminating anonymity, invading privacy, or limiting access to the Internet, except vaugely in one sentence that contains no quotes and seems to have been invented by the reporter, Shaun Waterman.
Apparently George Tenet, who is not a Government official, wants to improve security (and thereby, your privacy) in order to protect against threats to the network. I think that might be "controversial", as he puts it, because it would place higher standards on those who create network software for corporations (companies like Microsoft, SUN, and IBM). I wonder what Shaun Waterman wants?
Common Lisp is an ANSI standard language with many compatible implementations and is available on all the popular operating systems and processors. Some of those implementations are free and/or open-source, if that's important to you. So I would tend to disagree with your statement, "There is no portability". If someone just says "Lisp", they are generally assumed to be referring to ANSI Common Lisp. There are several other dialects of Lisp in popular use, such as GNU Emacs Lisp, and AutoLISP (AutoCAD), but those are not compatible with Common Lisp. Those particular dialects are application extension languages, not intended for general-purpose programming. There is also Scheme, which was originally conceived as a dialect of Lisp (over two decades ago) but which is arguably not really a Lisp. Anyway, it is quite different from Common Lisp. Your explanation that since most XML applications are written in Java, Python, or Perl -- Lisp must not be standard or portable -- doesn't seem logical to me. For one thing, most applications in general (XML or not) are not written in Lisp, but that does not mean that "there is no such thing as Lisp" as you put it. By the way, what happened to C++ in that list? I can't actually find anything in your message that makes any sense at all.
One nice thing about Java (and to a slightly lesser extent, Perl) is that it comes with a wealth of standard libraries. The situation with Lisp is not very good in that respect. Whilte Lisp has many or most of the libraries you'd wish for,it's harder to find them and they are less standardized. The Lisp community is actively working on seriously improving that situation.
For those who are not familiar with the Lisp Machine: it was a proprietary processor and architecture designed for high-performance Lisp computing in a personal workstation format. (The word "workstation" had not yet been invented.) It was invented at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory around 1977, and was commercialized by several spin-off companies about 1980. The entire operating system and everything was written in Lisp.
You are making some very strange assertions, there. I don't know about "popular claims", but I could point you to the documentation. During the early-mid 1980s, these machines were considered the Cadillacs of workstations (compared to the new SUN, Apollo, etc. machines that were coming out, and compared to mini/mainframe systems from DEC and others). They supported Lisp, and also many other languages (such as FORTRAN and ADA), and did most certainly have source-level debugging since the beginning. Many of the techniques that are common in today's advanced programming and debugging environments were pioneered on the Lisp Machine, and there are many useful debugging features that are still not available in today's C/C++/Java environments.There's a lot more history here that I could expound upon. The Lisp Machine companies eventually failed, and there are many opinions and extensive analysis of why that happened. I wouldn't say that it was a simple matter of price/performance, however. The last thing that the major Lisp Machine company did, however, was to finally port the system to conventional hardware (DEC Alpha, sigh). But by then it was too late for the company to survive.
It sure as hell was not due to a lack of features!
I would take issue with many of your other claims, as well, but this is enough for one message.
I am curious what system interface was missing or unsuitable for you in Lisp.
You mentioned threads, but all the commercial Lisp implementations include threads. (In some implementations, they are implemented using the underlying native OS threads, while in others, the threads are entirely internal to Lisp.) In Lisp, the facility is usually called "processes" or "multiprocessing", which is a slight terminology glitch. Lisp has had threads since about 1979, and the interface is very easy to use. What Lisp implementation were you using, and what problems did you have?
Lisp also has a very flexible system for dealing with filenames portably across operating systems, and it has the stream-oriented IO facilities. Most implementations also include interfaces to the network, either at the sockets or higher level.
And, of course, you can always just program using the operating system's facilities (by using the "foreign function call" facilities).
I think Lisp vendors are pretty interested to know what OS interfaces you think are missing. What exactly was the problem that you had?
This of course has already been done in Lisp, about 20 years ago.
Lisp continually evolved since its genesis in the 1950s, and major improvements and developments in many areas (such as IO, macro facilities, object-orientation) were made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Things have come a long way since Lisp 1.5. By the 1980s, only about half a dozen schools in the country were even vaugely abreast of the developments in Lisp, and not very many books (or even manuals) were available until around then. So it's not surprising that your exposure to Lisp was about an obscure historical language. Even today, I suspect that many or most teachers are still uninformed about what's in Common Lisp. Most of the requests for help with homework that I see on the Internet are oriented towards list processing. While Lisp is obviously good for that sort of thing, it suggests that students are not taught about how to use Lisp for what it's true value is: writing large, complex, evolvable systems.
The commercial Lisp implementations from Xanalys and Franz, at least, have bindings to proprietary GUI toolkits that are programmed at fairly high levels. The Xanalys toolkit is called CAPI, and is portable across Windows and Unix. There is also CLIM, which is a standardized, cross-platform, very high-level GUI system; this is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac. There is currently an effort to create a free implementation of this. There are others, but I haven't used them.