General talk about software patterns

[Ralph Johnson <johnson AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

On 10/25/04 2:18 AM, "Pascal Costanza" 
<pascal AT p-cos.net>
 wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> Because they make uninformed decisions. ...
> 
> Edi Weitz from Hamburg asked for Lisp programmers one or two years ago
> in comp.lang.lisp if people were interested to move to Hamburg for
> continuing a Lisp job in case he is hit by a bus. He has gotten about 15
> responses from all over the world, which convinced his client to indeed
> use Lisp for a project.
> 
> We Lispers and Smalltalkers tend to argue from technical grounds and the
> technical advantages of our preferred languages over other languages.
> However, these decisions are typically based purely on grounds of
> popularity (because they presumably get more - think "cheaper" -
> programmers then). Because of that we have to think on two levels at the
> same time, the technical and the social level. We foremostly have to
> provide new arguments on the latter, the former is already set.

I agree, the main reasons these languages aren't used are social rather than
technical.  Programmers must become more aware of social factors.

-Ralph Johnson