[Gardeners] Another Intro

[Steven H. Rogers]

Paolo Amoroso wrote:
> "Steven H. Rogers" <steve at shrogers.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>Forth to high level ones like Lisp and APL.  I'm not making significant 
>>use of Lisp at work and the Gardeners project could remove some of the 
>>barriers to doing so. 
> 
> 
> Any specific examples?  Welcome aboard,
> 
> 
> Paolo

I think the barriers have been kicked around c.l.l and various weblogs quite 
a bit, but here's my list.

1.  AI backlash - AI is very interesting and sometimes useful, but the AI 
boom and bust left Lisp tarnished in the eyes of mainstream computer science 
and business.  People need to be convinced that Lisp is a good general 
purpose language.

2.  Misperception - Many who have been exposed to Lisp believe it to be 
slow, only useful for symbolic computation, or hard to learn.  An APL friend 
who'd studied Lisp in college told me he thought Lisp was a low level 
language.  The course that exposed him to Lisp emphasized basic list 
manipulation and he was left with the impression that developing serious 
applications would require tons of low level twiddling.

3.  Inertia - Most programmers want to use what they already know to solve 
problems.  Some want new problems, though others seem content to solve the 
same problems over and over.

4.  Cost of Entry - The commercial Lisps are of high quality, but their 
licensing costs can put people off.  Yes, the commercial vendors have 
evaluation versions and licensing terms can be negotiated, but many won't 
bother.  The free implementations lack cross platform support for the 
features that a lot of people want (the Reddit problem).

5.  Elitism - The c.l.l newsgroup has some vocal and sometime abrasive 
participants that can scare newbies away.  Paul Graham's writing has done a 
lot to promote Lisp, but he can leave the impression that only the best 
programmers can use Lisp.

Regards,
Steve
-- 
Steven H. Rogers, Ph.D., steve at shrogers.com
Weblog: http://shrogers.com/weblog
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
-- John McCarthy