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Re: LispM Market Share

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Date: Wed, 17 Jan 90 15:08 PST
From: Eric Buckman <BUCKMAN@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
Subject: Re: LispM Market Share 
To: slug@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com
In-Reply-To: <9001162356.AA20393@diamond.STC.LOCKHEED.COM>
Message-ID: <19900117230801.5.BUCKMAN@NILS.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>

    Date: Wed, 17-Jan-90 09:00:10-PST
    Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 17:56:15 CST
    Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 15:53 PST
    From: "kosma%ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com"%ALAN.kahuna.DECNET.LOCKHEED.COM@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
    From: Montgomery Kosma <kosma@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>

	      8. Lisp is still has the aura of being the "AI" language.  Lisp
		 machines are for AI hackers, no?
  
	  I don't know quite how rare it is for somebody to be doing computational
	  physics on a Symbolics (probably extremely rare aside from the
	  occasionaly Connection Machine front end) but I guess some (at least
	  one) people are.  If it wasn't for the Connection Machine I would be
	  doing fortran on a sun right now (****DEFINITELY**** not by choice), and
	  as it is, we will probably be concentrating more on Sun SPARC front ends
	  for the connection machine rather than the symbolics, primarily due to
	  issues of speed.
  
	I find LISPM a wonderful place to crunch numbers as well as symbols
	and objects.  Selling a LISPM as JUST an AI machine is certainly
	selling it short.

	Is the issue of speed the fact that you can't hang array processors off
	your LISPM, or that the number crunching performance of a LISPM isn't
	good enough.  I find that with some care in coding, LISPM number
	crunch as well as the SUN 3's i have access to.

    My AMIGA can number crunch as well as the sun 3's.  My symbolics (which
    costs at least 10 times as much) doesn't compare too well with our
    recently-acquired SPARCstations.  I'm not at ALL satisfied with
    Symbolics being comparable to one of Sun's outdated models.

Keeping in mind of course that YOU are comparing an outdated Symbolics (you're
3645) with the new SPARCstation.

	k

    monty kosma
    kosma@alan.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com