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1Re: press releases -- comments0
Date: Fri, 19 May 89 16:43 EDT
From: miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller)
1 Date: Thu, 18 May 89 23:20 EDT
From: pan@Athena.Pangaro.Dialnet.Symbolics.Com (Paul Pangaro)
Symbolics pricing etc. vs. UNIX world looks a whole lot like Apple vs. IBM
on PCs. Sure, apple can overprice for a while, but IBM sw is catching up,
the IBM market is a lot bigger, and all the developers are moving there. I
expect the same to happen with lispms in the next couple years if Symbolics
doesn't start competing headon PRICEwise with the better lisp environments
(e.g. Allegro CL) running on RISC machines (10k or less for a DECstation
S3100, Sparcstation, etc. plus about a k for CL). Diminishing returns, guys.
0Why not just hire Stallman to re-write unix in lisp (Genera) and port
the resulting environment to these unix machines. Should be easy. Just
need a 2 or 3 letter function name generator, random length arglist
generator, 1 to 3 letter switch generator....
(tar "/foo/bar/" -dev "/dev/xyzn" -l -a -c ...)
Seriously though, if I were going to port an application to a delivery
machine Gold Hill, Symbolics, and TI lose out because I have to buy
hardware too. Allegro or Lucid look pretty nice but I'm still screwed
because there's this ludicrous "per-copy" run-time license fee that
lisp-vendors always want to charge for applications that *I* develop and
market. C vendors don't do this. !!Common-Lisp for Common-People!! At
any rate you will have an *extremely* difficult time prying me off the
keyboard of my 3600 to develop on one of these RISC machines. But again
that's because of the software not the hardware. Will the "RISC catch
up" occur in a couple of years? I'm not so sure, but Symbolics should
seriously consider this point when making decisions because I think all
would agree that the "RISC catch up" *will* occur.
I wonder how the performance of Genera would fare on a DECstation (w/o
hardware assist)?
-Mark Alexander