Date: Mon, 15 Jan 90 10:08 EST
From: Len%AIP1%TSD%atc.bendix.com@RELAY.CS.NET
Here's a few more to add to your list:
1. The defense community is beginning to get serious about Ada.
Lisp machines aren't perceived to have any advantages as Ada
engines.
I hope someone at Symbolics will respond to this.
2. If the application has real-time constraints, Lisp is not the
language of choice.
Really?
3. Run-time and development environments should be compatible and allow
a minimum effort port. There are cheap/fast Unix delivery boxes.
There are no cheap/fast Lisp delivery boxes. Therefore develop on
Unix machines.
Have you tried out Symbolics CLOE? Those 386 (not to mention 486)
machines these days are not so shabby, and you can do your debugging
predominantly in Genera (there's always something to debug on the
delivery end, but so far I've found such problems to be essentially
little ones). Granted if you want the highest performance, you may
have to do some machine-specific tuning, which can lead you to the
debugger in the delivery environment. It's basically the same debugger
as in Genera with various limitations.
4. File read performance is crummy on the Lispms. Since that's done so
often, it leaves the impression that the Lispms are slow machines.
This is quite true, and very unfortunate.