What do users REALLY want?

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Thu, 21 Dec 89 12:10 EST
    From: attila@flash.bellcore.com (Leslie A. Walko)

    As far as the difficulty of porting is concerned, Joshua would be easy.
    Statice would be much harder since most of the code is comprised of the
    file access and optimization routines which are OS or machine specific.
    Since I spent the last several years in data bases, I don't know how
    hard it would be to make Concordia run under CLIM, but I suspect that
    you are correct.

Someone here reminded me that the ease of porting we are talking about
is relative.  Getting reasonable performance out of a port of an
application originally written for a Lisp Machine can be pretty
difficult.  In order to get comparable performance out of other Lisps
you need a decent amount of type declarations.  Adding declarations to
someone else's code can be pretty tricky.

    let us grant that, then would it not make sense for Symbolics to port
    all their software to run on Unix boxes?  And isn't that what the
    original suggestion was?

No, the original suggestion was to port the individual pieces of
software that make up Genera, and sell them separately.

    So I stand by the original suggestion that
      "this may be a good way to build a survival strategy for Symbolics.  If
      the hardware market collapses, they should remain a viable software
      company."

Yes, but that's a big if.

                                                barmar