Re: [spr4004] Open Common Lisp system from CMU

[Scott_Fahlman@SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

Jim,

Great.  It looks like this exchange has been useful.  And I'm pleased to
hear that we are already getting credit in your documents.

On the question of small executables, I think that this will become a lot
less important to people as time goes on.  We will soon have a tree-shaking
GC that should shrink most applications down to a couple of meg.  That's
still not 100K, but in a world where two megabytes is one chip and 100M+
disk drives are the norm, that shouldn't loom so large in people's
thinking, except in very specialized delivery systems (i.e. warheads).  Of
course, this assumes that the 640K mentality of small-computer operating
systems finally gets swept away for good -- I think that's happening now,
but it is already 5 years too late.

What we really need to do is get Lisp or Scheme into the high schools and
kiddie computers.  Whenever that happens, basic is dead and C is on the
ropes.  Kids will take to this stuf and never, ever want to go back to
primitive stone tools or oppressive languages like Pascal or Ada.  That's
where the revolution will come from, not from big companies.  I just hope
we can all hang in there long enough to make this happen.

Regards,
Scott