[Gcl-devel] Re: Why is Lisp not as popular as Python?

[Camm Maguire]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.lang.lisp as well.

Greetings!

Revzala Haelmic <address@hidden> writes:

> Instead of some metaphysical reasoning, I'd like to tell you a story.
> I needed to write a program which works with DBMS, which
> is concurrently accessed from several workstations. This program had
> to have a GUI, because users needed a usable interface for entering
> information and frequently getting reports on-the-fly. Finally, it had
> to be in touch with another system working under win32, and the one
> suitable interface for that system was COM. These are technical
> requirements. I also needed as free licenses as possible for all
> components I will use. So, neither Allegro, nor Lispworks meet this
> requirement. $99 is too much, but what is worse, I would be dependent
> on their proprietary code. And I definitely have no experience with
> it and have no idea about the quality of that code. I frightened
> to use GCL, because some of computers where this program needed to be
> run had only 32Mb of RAM, and the version of GCL I had did allocate
> 70Mb on start by some strange reason. Also I didn't know if there are
> any packages available for GCL at all. So, CLISP remained. I had no
> luck finding packages for COM and DBMS I used. Several hours
> of crawling the internet gave me an idea that packages like that
> exist, but for commercial or incompatible Lisp versions. For GUI,
> I choose GTK. So I needed to write wrappers for another two
> components. But I had no time to do that, and, saying sincerely,
> no experience.

Just to note that the memory bounds for GCL can be set at
configuration time via the --enable-maxpages switch.  Please ask at
address@hidden for more info if needed.

Take care,


-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah