111–120 of 145 posts
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What is the example web browser?
Firefox and Chromium vs Internet Explorer.
I always just assumed it was mostly because of the desire to have a proprietary system he could generate revenue out of, instead of wading into GPL-esque territory that tends to go along with LISP. It's also one of the main reasons I have been using Octave and Python/Anaconda.
Most proper Lisps are all proprietary, what GPL scheme? None of the GPL Lisps compare to what is offered by the likes of Allegro Common Lisp and similar environments.
Care to elaborate?
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Firefox and Chromium vs Internet Explorer.
Today, no open source browser is clearly more featureful and functional than the closed source alternatives, so seems like a transient aberration rather than a canonical example.
[1] Safari is kind of a border case -- all the chrome is closed source, but the rendering engine and I think the Javascript engine are open source. I am lumping it in as an open source project here, I can understand why someone might argue the point though.
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Today, no open source browser is clearly more featureful and functional than the closed source alternatives, so seems like a transient aberration rather than a canonical example.
I mean, the people who maintain far and away the most used closed-source browser, IE[1], are deprecating it and have tried to distance themselves from IE as much as possible in Microsoft Edge. And this is entirely because IE lacks features that Chrome and Firefox have, largely but far from entirely related to standards support for HTML5. I have been using Microsoft Edge since it was available in the Technical Preview…
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Wolfram's decision at worst did not impede the development of a tremendously successful software product. At best it enabled it. Mathematica is 27 years old. It predates the i486 which was the first mass market CPU with an FPU. In the early 1980's betting on Lisp was betting on Lisp machines and workstation class hardware. The first version of Mathematica ran on M68000 Macintosh machines. It's hard to imagine overcom…
> The first version of Mathematica ran on M68000 Macintosh machines. It's hard to imagine overcoming the pain that something slower than C would have inflicted on users. According to this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma#Commercialization ) Wikipedia article, Macsyma (a Lisp-based CAS that Mathematica was designed to compete with) was running on 68000 Sun-1s in the mid-80s and a Windows port came out about a y…
Commercial Macsyma is ... a special, and rather sad case. As explained to me by Danny Hillis in 1982-3 when he wished my company, LMI, could provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines, Inc. to help develop the Connection Machine 1, one motivation was Symbolics' pathological business practices, and the nastiest example then was Macsyma. Back then the MIT Technology Licensing office was still horrible, and it was arranged that Arthur D. Little, I think, recommend how Macsyma be licensed, and it ended up being exclusively to Symbolics, which was not a common approach.
As far as we could tell, Symbolics bought it primarily to keep it out of the hands of LMI and anyone wanting to run it on conventional hardware, and went so far as to try to get people who have Vaxsyma copies to send them back and stop using it, which was not well received as you might imagine. That helped Fateman, using the DoE which had sponsored much of the work, to force MIT to release a snapshot as open source, which eventually became Maxmia.
In house, Symbolics treated it with benign neglect, and I don't think it was massively improved. This situation became ironic as their hardware business declined and the Macsyma unit became an important cash cow, but as these things go, for the usual internal political reasons, it never got development resources commensurate with its actual status and potential.
MIT also didn't reward the people who'd originally written it at MIT, something Joel Moses, who I happened to be directly reporting to in the 1987-8 time frame when he was the EECS department head, was obviously not happy with, along with I'm sure many others. So in short, Symbolics did nearly everything they could to mess up the Macsyma community and product, and the noted decline, once there were good alternatives, was inevitable.
RMS is not 100% wrong in his loathing of Symbolics....
I think the author is misremembering Wolfram's claims. I recall attending the first open demo of SMP, where Wolfram (and I think co-author Chris Cole) were demoing it in a large Caltech lecture hall. Here's what I recall. They had tried to use Macsyma for their physics work, and found experimentally that it was too slow on what they considered to be "medium" problems, and could not handle "large" problems at all. The…
I wonder if Wolfram's 100-times-slower reference point was based on a very particular comparison. Suppose you benchmarked a numerical algorithm that dealt with a lot of matrix-vector operations. And suppose you compared, on the one hand, a C or Fortran implementation that used arrays and native machine finite-precision numbers, against a Lisp implementation that used lists and the sort of "exact" arithmetic described…
P.S: Maxima actually uses a list-of-lists to represent a matrix.
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Well, GIMPs UI at least is totally unusable. I ended up using Krita instead, which actually has a UI that makes sense. Additionally, even Krita supports a lot more stuff than GIMP – from proper animations, keyframes to all kinds of color spaces. (Yes, 32-bit floats for CMYK color spaces are possible in Krita)
I wonder how so many people manage to use "totally unusable" program. Krita is nice and all, but it's quite different product than GIMP, designed specifically for drawing , when GIMP is sort of "general stuff", like Photoshop is. And Krita is free and open source as well, so it doesn't support the original claim. And GIMP doesn't really lack many features Photoshop has, and even has some that Photoshop doesn't. UI co…
Like colorspaces, effect masks, etc.
I found Krita to be a far better photoshop replacement than GIMP, actually. (With two differences: moving selections is a bit more complicated, the option for that is hidden by default, and it does not have a simple contrast-brightness slider filter)
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> The first version of Mathematica ran on M68000 Macintosh machines. It's hard to imagine overcoming the pain that something slower than C would have inflicted on users. According to this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma#Commercialization ) Wikipedia article, Macsyma (a Lisp-based CAS that Mathematica was designed to compete with) was running on 68000 Sun-1s in the mid-80s and a Windows port came out about a y…
For this domain which is largely compute bound when it counts, for the PC systems it was targeting back in those days, C was almost certainly the right choice if you had enough resources for the extra programming work required. Commercial Macsyma is ... a special, and rather sad case. As explained to me by Danny Hillis in 1982-3 when he wished my company, LMI, could provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines, Inc. t…
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Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows. It runs on any hardware you can imagine from satellites to hand-held devices and the majority of the super-computers in the world.
> Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows. Linux is a lot cheaper than Windows. More importantly, it's a lot LOT cheaper than most proprietary Unices. And it's freely modifiable. If that makes it "better" for you, have at, I am not going to quibble. If you are talking about Linux as a desktop, rather than server, operating system... there are reasons that Windows users outnumber Linux users on the desktop…
And Linux and the BSDs are getting a lot more love on consoles, too – look at the SteamBox.
With 16% of all current generation games being able to run on linux, often (like in the case of the new Batman game) even running better than on Windows (or expected to do so), it is getting more and more towards equality.