What has Symbolics done for me lately?

[Marc Ernst Eddy van Woerkom]

>   A disarmingly simple question to ask.  Why,
>   pray tell, has erlang not displaced Java or
>   even Visual Basic?

Java is targeted for those who don't grok C++. ;-)
Visual Basic is targeted for those who don't grok Java. ;-)

Erlang is in the avantgarde state shortly before the common masses
discoverd it, like the internet was in the early 90ies, 
or Linux was a few years ago.

It realy needs trivializing and hyping.
That's why Eric and I will put some sweat into an Eclipse
version, so that all those "GUI clickers" can bang on Erlang. :)


>   A short little ramble of my own opinions:

Thank you very much for that very interesting ramble!

The memories you value for Symbolics, I value for the SGI
workstations I had the pleasure to use in the past.
All victims to the beige PC boxes.


>   ran C code.  The project I worked on was about
>   250K lines of LISP, developed by a team of 5 or 6,
>   an impossible task in any other language on any
>   other hardware.

250k lines of LISP, that sounds scary (not to mention
the millions of parantheses involved :)


>   3) The Meta Object Protocol (MOP) of Common LISP
>   Object System introduced the concept of reflexive and
>   introspective languages (although Smalltalk took a first
>   cut at it)  -- all the Java stuff for introspection
>   come directly from  these concepts.  

Oh, I read about a MOP the first time here

   http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/~chiba/openc++.html

interesting to know where that idea comes from.

Thanks again,
Marc