At 22:23 +0200 8/25/02, Dirk Riehle wrote:
>Choosing CLOS or the like:
>
>- you don't get enough people
>- those people you get cost too much
>- you are incompatible with the rest of the world
>- adapters and bug-fixes will always be last for you

Though it's not relevant, I would argue like this:

My team will be able to program circles around everyone else. They
will be able to construct rapidly a language specific to the problem
we are solving rather than using a language designed by computer
scientists worrying about their place in history and a herd of
library writers working in cubicles a thousand miles from our
business. My team will be able to use a language without training
wheels. Strong typing is for weak minds, and it's exactly like they
say at MIT: Our current popular languages are designed to help losers
lose less.

I will be able to point to various examples where Lisp programmers
have written not only 3-5 times faster, but they wrote things other
programmers thought were impossible. In this regard, I'd tell the
CEO, our competitors will be spending all their time trying to figure
out that it's really possible we're doing what we're doing, because
they will be thinking in terms of customization at compile time or
link time, not at runtime.

Moreover, we will be operating where the CEO is focusing on his or
her specialty and not imposing his or her knuckleheaded view on
technology.

Because Lisp is dead, I'll get better programmers for less money.
I'll be able to guarantee 50 more IQ points for the same pay. And my
guys will be able to spend their time typing in value not book
keeping overhead and typing in type descriptions because their guys
are too stupid to know when they type + numbers are involved.

Because no one uses Lisp, I'll have my pick of thousands of great,
experienced programmers looking to work for someone with a non-zero
IQ, not the ones fresh out of college with 10 programs under their
belts.

I'll be compatible with everything because it is right now. And if
someone throws me a bug, I can code around it in a few minutes. Being
a niche market means we're more proprietary. People will not use Lisp
to compete with us because they are lamebrains listening to the
latest fashion statement from Sun or Microsoft.The open source crowd
isn't even smart enough to notice C++, so they are especially nowhere
in the picture.

Of course, no CEO will belive this because every one of them is stupid.

-rpg-