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Why don't more companies use them?
I assume you were responding to my post. 
Marketing is definitely a part of it, but I can't help but think that there have been other factors I don't fully understand yet. For example, back in the 1980s Lisp was used in the U.S. for various projects. Symbolics made Lisp machines. That died by the time the 1990s came around. Symbolics disappeared from the scene by the mid-90s, I think. The one project that proved everyone wrong was ViaWeb, created by Paul Graham and his associates. ViaWeb is now Yahoo Store. The original implementation was almost 100% Lisp. Since Yahoo got it they've translated most of it into C++ and Perl. The reason? There aren't enough Lisp developers around to maintain it. Graham's only consolation was that even the parts they translated into C++ had to be kind of Lisp-like, which fits with Greenspun's 10th rule:
?Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.?
Lisp continues to be used. It sounds like the only real world applications where it's become a major player since its heyday is with airline reservation systems. Just about all of them use Lisp to some extent. The most prominent being Orbitz. It's used to search flight schedules to form itineraries. With the discount sites, it tries to find the lowest priced itineraries as well.
Smalltalk was in use for real world projects by the late 80s, but died out in the early 1990s. It's still around and kicking in the U.S. There are the occasional, rare want ads for people with Smalltalk skills, but it's nothing like it was 16 years ago. I know, because I remember when it was common to see want ads looking for people with this skill.
I read about this recently. According to one guy who's followed Smalltalk's progress for a long time, the main problem was the Smalltalk community itself. They couldn't unite around a common way forward. The vision was lost, everyone went their own way. And so companies stopped using it. Apparently this has happened a few times in the Smalltalk community. It's showed signs of it even recently.
I read a bit of satire online a while back about what was going on with the Lisp community. It sounded like it was a similar thing. The community could agree on some things, but not on some other very important matters, and so it remains in minority status, at least in the U.S.
Smalltalk is apparently doing well in Europe, and is growing in use in Canada. It sounds like its rise in Canada is due to a web framework for Smalltalk called Seaside. One of the co-authors of Seaside is Canadian, and he used it to create DabbleDB (www.dabbledb.com), a free-form online cross between a spreadsheet and a database, for all those "Excel database" users out there.
Seaside has some promising features, the main one being that you have to deal with session state a LOT less. For simple apps. you don't have to deal with it at all. What a boon! It has AJAX capabilities as well, so you can just deal with the API, without writing a line of Javascript. I'm guessing there's a similar library for RoR.
Marketing is definitely a part of it, but I can't help but think that there have been other factors I don't fully understand yet. For example, back in the 1980s Lisp was used in the U.S. for various projects. Symbolics made Lisp machines. That died by the time the 1990s came around. Symbolics disappeared from the scene by the mid-90s, I think. The one project that proved everyone wrong was ViaWeb, created by Paul Graham and his associates. ViaWeb is now Yahoo Store. The original implementation was almost 100% Lisp. Since Yahoo got it they've translated most of it into C++ and Perl. The reason? There aren't enough Lisp developers around to maintain it. Graham's only consolation was that even the parts they translated into C++ had to be kind of Lisp-like, which fits with Greenspun's 10th rule:
?Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.?
Lisp continues to be used. It sounds like the only real world applications where it's become a major player since its heyday is with airline reservation systems. Just about all of them use Lisp to some extent. The most prominent being Orbitz. It's used to search flight schedules to form itineraries. With the discount sites, it tries to find the lowest priced itineraries as well.
Smalltalk was in use for real world projects by the late 80s, but died out in the early 1990s. It's still around and kicking in the U.S. There are the occasional, rare want ads for people with Smalltalk skills, but it's nothing like it was 16 years ago. I know, because I remember when it was common to see want ads looking for people with this skill.
I read about this recently. According to one guy who's followed Smalltalk's progress for a long time, the main problem was the Smalltalk community itself. They couldn't unite around a common way forward. The vision was lost, everyone went their own way. And so companies stopped using it. Apparently this has happened a few times in the Smalltalk community. It's showed signs of it even recently.
I read a bit of satire online a while back about what was going on with the Lisp community. It sounded like it was a similar thing. The community could agree on some things, but not on some other very important matters, and so it remains in minority status, at least in the U.S.
Smalltalk is apparently doing well in Europe, and is growing in use in Canada. It sounds like its rise in Canada is due to a web framework for Smalltalk called Seaside. One of the co-authors of Seaside is Canadian, and he used it to create DabbleDB (www.dabbledb.com), a free-form online cross between a spreadsheet and a database, for all those "Excel database" users out there.
Seaside has some promising features, the main one being that you have to deal with session state a LOT less. For simple apps. you don't have to deal with it at all. What a boon! It has AJAX capabilities as well, so you can just deal with the API, without writing a line of Javascript. I'm guessing there's a similar library for RoR.
Posted by Mark Miller
28th Oct 2006
