General talk about software patterns

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

On 10/25/04 12:57 AM, "Mike Beedle" 
<mike.beedle AT newgovernance.com>
 wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 
>> 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".

Smalltalk development tools are extremely easy to use.  Eclipse has a lot
more hype, but is much slower, much more complicated, and less powerful.
Sure, it looks good compared to most other Java development tools, but not
to Smalltalk or to the old Lisp Machine.

It might be the perceived complexity of the language, but it is not the
complexity of the language.  You could argue that C isn't really that more
complex than Lisp, it is just complex in a different way.   But C++ is an
order of magnitude more complex than Lisp by any criteria.

"Marketing" is important, but is a very complex subject.  Perl and Python
don't have big companies behind them.  Java is certainly a monument to the
power of marketing, but C++ was never marketed like that.

It is important to know why great programming languages don't get more
market share because until we figure out how to make them win, it is hardly
worth inventing better languages.

-Ralph Johnson