General talk about software patterns

["Reich, Shalom" <Shalom.Reich AT gs.com>]

On 10/25/04 7:58 AM, "Ralph Johnson" 
<johnson AT cs.uiuc.edu>
 wrote:

> 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.

I know that I only used Lisp in a Programming Languages course.  It
certainly did NOT give me a feel for the types of problems the language
could solve and was good at solving.

Speaking for myself, I only thought about the role of programming language
in framing the solution to a problem when I was forced to change my way of
thinking from procedural to OO.  The examples in Ruminations on C++ (by
Andrew Koenig) finally made that explicit in my mind - rather than just
being a sub-concious piece of baggage.

I still don't know Lisp well but I now see many problems that it can handle
nicely in the financial modeling world.  There are rumors that my current
employer uses a private language that LOOKS sort-of OO as a wrapper around
LISP in order to do Monte Carlo financial simulations.  However, my employer
(apperently) would rather train people in this private language rather than
have them write Lisp directly.  I now wonder why this is true.

Shalom Reich