On Jun 8, 2006, at 5:33, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Matthew S. wrote:
For big values of long - your guess is likely as good as mine, but
I’d
pick Lisp. Four decades and still going strong.
Actually, Lispnik Paul Graham is “redesigning” Lisp to last 100 years
(from now). Do a search for “Paul Graham” and “ARC” to see what he’s
proposing. It hasn’t moved a lot recently; perhaps he’s leaning
towards
jumping on the Ruby bandwagon. 
I actually pointed towards Paul Graham earlier in the thread, though
not about Arc in particular. I’ve been watching Arc for a while, and
I think I’ll reserve judgement until it actually appears. My bet is
that PG’s been sidetracked by the spam issue in much the same way
that Knuth got sidetracked by TeX while writing the Art of Computer
Programming.
And as a result, “business acceptance” in its traditional sense is
becoming less relevant to language design because typical businesses
are contributing less to language design; essentially nothing in
direct terms, and even their marginal contribution of providing jobs
to direct contributors (i.e. jobs not involving those contributions)
is proportionally lower than it ever has been.
Hmmm … well, maybe business didn’t contribute much to the design of
Ruby, but C, C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, APL and Fortran were
designed by businesses!
Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (and their
colleagues and collaborators) may disagree with your assertion that
they are ‘businesses’ rather than ‘people’. APL emerged out of
Harvard’s proto-CS department (not really a business), though the
name of its creator eludes me. I’d also be willing to bet that there
was an individual at IBM directly responsible for designing Fortran
(though this hunch is based more on the nature of Fortran and the
size and nature of the industry at that point in history than any
concrete knowledge).
This was exactly the point I’m trying to make: if a business wants
something which conforms to their needs, they need to directly invest
in the process of its creation. Such as by hiring people like those
listed above to design languages.
In any case, it wasn’t the Suns, Microsofts, and IBMs of the world
that I was talking about, but those companies who aren’t in the
business of creating languages and tools, but merely sit on the
sidelines and say “but is it Acceptable to Business? I won’t let you
use it unless it’s Acceptable to Business.” Their contribution to
projects like Ruby (or even Java, if you include its community
process) has always been the marginal one of providing incidental
employment to people who made direct contributions in their spare time.
That marginal contribution has recently been dropping in importance
for a number of reasons, so it really shouldn’t surprise these
businesses that projects to which they make essentially no
contribution don’t really reflect their needs.
What I’m trying to point out is that standing on the sidelines saying
“wow, you’ve got a really nice project there, maybe you should make
it Acceptable to Business so I can use it” is an unrealistic
solution, at least in part because the implicit threat of “or noone
will ever give you money for it” isn’t particularly true anymore.
matthew smillie.
