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LispM Market Share

Received: from NILS.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com by ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com via CHAOS with CHAOS-MAIL id 15618; 15 Jan 90 11:10:44 PST
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 90 11:10 PST
From: Eric Buckman <BUCKMAN@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
Subject: LispM Market Share
To: slug@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com
In-Reply-To: <9001142201.AA24154@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Message-ID: <19900115191043.4.BUCKMAN@NILS.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>

    Date: Sun, 14-Jan-90 15:10:00-PST
    Date: Sun, 14 Jan 90 16:01:17 -0600
    From: forbus@cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

       From: JCMA@REAGAN.AI.MIT.EDU (John C. Mallery)

       I believe that the only reason two guys can hack and maintain a 6 megabyte
       lisp-based AI system is power of the lisp machine development environment.
       This task seems hopelessly intractable in the ``MAClisp model of lisp'' whose
       current rendition is Lucid running under UNIX, and even more remote hacking in
       C.  I imagine that anybody else with a large lisp system would
       quickly come to the same conclusion.

    I would disagree that the situation is "hopless" with regard to the
    Lucid/Unix combination.  I have both a 3670 with 24MB RAM/ Eagle drive
    and an IBM-RT 125 with 16MB RAM/ 620MB disk + Megapel color display.
    And I also have a similarly configured IBM-RT at home.  I hack Lisp
    heavily on all of them, from small programs for classes to large
    research systems.  (I have never written a line of C code in my life
    and intend never to.)  I don't think my code is 6MB in source, but not
    only do I have to deal with my own code, but that of my eight graduate
    students, collaborators at other sites, etc.  
    [....]

It was my understanding that Ken Forbus was still working in Release 6.1, and
therefore is comparing three year old Symbolics technology to current RT
technology.  I could be mixing him up with someone else.  Ken, PLEASE CORRECT me
if I'm wrong.  (I think this because from other mail of yours I've seen on SLUG,
it looked to me like you weren't on Software maintanance.)

eric