Re: Lisp considered unfinished / marketing strategy

[kr@shell.portal.com (kr)]

At 11:22 6/6/95, Kalman Reti wrote:
>>>It is easy to say "we did that 10 years ago in Lisp".

>I suspect being perceived as sophisticated is a hindrance, not a help, in
>mass acceptance.

But by now, other languages/environments are starting to catch up, so the
gap in sophistication is getting a lot smaller. Some sophistication is now
generally expected.

By mass marketing I meant at the level of other languages such as C/C++ for
developers, not necessarily end users.

A possible argument for helping marketing, which might break some of the
LISP stigma, could be to say that now, as machine power has caught up on
PCs, it is possible to use a professional LISP system even without owning
an expensive workstation or dedicated LISP machine. This elegance has now
become accessible to "the man on the street". :-)

There must be some way by which one could leverage on the long track record
of LISP. One could also bundle it with some very classic and famous LISP
code that everybody has heard about but never experienced personally, to
give examples of complex issues that would have been difficult to achieve
by other means. How about some of the Genetic Algorithm work, which was
coded in LISP because this was the right way to do it ?


Greetings
Markus Krummenacker