General talk about software patterns

["Mike Beedle" <beedlem AT e-architects.com>]

Ralph Johnson wrote:
> Lisp is a wonderful language, and many great things have been 
> done with it.  However, for some reason, fewer people are using 
> it now than used to use it.

Ralph:

In my case, I use Lisp for two reasons:  1) to produce productions business
systems that are better than other systems (the core of our workflow system
is written in a variant of Lisp and it has been deployed in 600
installations world-wide http://www.newgovernance.com) Btw, it was inspired
by all those wonderful conversations that we had in this very list about
multi-paradigmic approaches and languages  i.e. the "Functional Future is
here now" etc. circa May of 1999. 

and

2) I also use it to "programming language research", primarily about the
"Paterno" idea also exposed in this list circa January of 2000.

Lisp is a wonderful language for programming paradigm exploration with a
good track record, I think.  I wanted to write a language that was
"pattern-oriented" but this is hard when you start from scratch.  On the
other hand I could get a feel of what it would be like in Lisp really easy.

In the future, I want to combine the two ideas:  to capture "business
patterns" in code in a workflow system.

Mb wrote:
> But just to put some real case example of "related things in the 
> real world" Paul Graham, btw, made 50 million dollars at Yahoo 
> Stores using these ideas...   He patternized Yahoo stores...

Ralph wrote:
> Paul Graham built a system and a company, and sold the company to Yahoo.
> Yahoo took it over and was successful with it, but eventually rewrote it 
> all in Java.  This is a typical story.  Why do people take successful
> systems in Lisp (or Smalltalk, or ...) and rewrite them in much 
> more boring and less powerful languages?  We need to understand this if 
> we want to make the world safe for powerful languages.

True.  I used to think it was "the complexity of the language" but these
days I think it is "pure ole marketing", and perhaps "sexiness and ease of
the development tools".

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that 16 of 23 GOF patterns were
acknowledged by Lisp very early in the game i.e. the language offers
abstractions or constructs for them.  But I am ever more intrigued about
having a generic way to capture *any pattern* in code.

As we see Java become universally accepted and simultaneously transform
itself more and more into C++ I am saddened and puzzled but ... I keep
thinking there is "a lot of marketing behind this" to keep my sanity ;-)

- Mike