Jeremy Smith wrote: > > Matthew Astley wrote: > > > > I think I lack background on how standards are made and adopted, so > > would appreciate input from anyone who remembers or has read about > > CL's formation. Is there a "The making of ANSI CL" document? > > > > This is not a top-post... > > According to Kent Pitman, it took many thousands of dollars to pay for > ANSI CL. I can't quite find the usenet post he wrote right now. > > In 1987, Symbolics' revenue was $100 million. That means they could > easily afford to participate/fund ANSI specs. I don't want to speculate > on how much money the main Lisp players make. > > Personally, I believe that the best thing is to ignore all that > 'standards' stuff, and just use grassroots campaigning to get people > using whatever library it is. > > But one important point is this: New versions of Java have been known to > break old Java programs badly, and it's only been around about 12 years. > But I can still run 1989 Lisp code (that CMU repository with stuff like > profilers and single-step debugging tools) in Clisp, without a single > change. Of course, I wish I could say the same about threads and > sockets. > > I'd say that the Common Lisp spec has been *too* well designed. :-) > > Cheers, > > Jeremy. > -- > | Jeremy Smith > | Founder and Developer, San Fran Systems > _______________________________________________ > Gardeners mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
Here's a couple of references: http://home.hakuhale.net/rbc/symbolics/announcements/19870519-ivory.txt "For its fiscal year ended June 30, 1986, Symbolics had revenue of $114.2 million." That's not bad for 1986! Must have been the Google of their day. As for Java, it broke a friend's program, called Gzz, a version from 2000, in about 2002. As for Kent Pitman saying ANSI is expensive on usenet, I can't find it. :-( Jeremy. -- | Jeremy Smith | Founder and Developer, San Fran Systems _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
