[Gardeners] SSC review for current CL implementations.

[Jeremy Smith]

Jeremy Smith wrote:
> 
> Matthew Astley wrote:
> >
> > I think I lack background on how standards are made and adopted, so
> > would appreciate input from anyone who remembers or has read about
> > CL's formation.  Is there a "The making of ANSI CL" document?
> >
> > This is not a top-post...
> 
> According to Kent Pitman, it took many thousands of dollars to pay for
> ANSI CL. I can't quite find the usenet post he wrote right now.
> 
> In 1987, Symbolics' revenue was $100 million. That means they could
> easily afford to participate/fund ANSI specs. I don't want to speculate
> on how much money the main Lisp players make.
> 
> Personally, I believe that the best thing is to ignore all that
> 'standards' stuff, and just use grassroots campaigning to get people
> using whatever library it is.
> 
> But one important point is this: New versions of Java have been known to
> break old Java programs badly, and it's only been around about 12 years.
> But I can still run 1989 Lisp code (that CMU repository with stuff like
> profilers and single-step debugging tools) in Clisp, without a single
> change. Of course, I wish I could say the same about threads and
> sockets.
> 
> I'd say that the Common Lisp spec has been *too* well designed. :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jeremy.
> --
> | Jeremy Smith
> | Founder and Developer, San Fran Systems
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Here's a couple of references:

http://home.hakuhale.net/rbc/symbolics/announcements/19870519-ivory.txt

"For its fiscal year ended June 30, 1986, Symbolics had revenue of
$114.2 million."

That's not bad for 1986! Must have been the Google of their day. As for
Java, it broke a friend's program, called Gzz, a version from 2000, in
about 2002. As for Kent Pitman saying ANSI is expensive on usenet, I
can't find it. :-(

Jeremy.
-- 
| Jeremy Smith
| Founder and Developer, San Fran Systems