Lisp Lives! |
No longer linked only to AI, the language is enjoying resurgence in a wide range of arenas.
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Statement
and answer on the SD West
show floor.
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Nostalgia
hit when I saw Franz Lisp evangelists
on the show floor at the SD West
2004 Expo sporting (got-lisp-p) black
t-shirts with the simple answer, t,
on the back. I thought Lisp
was dead by association—at
one time it was synonymous with AI,
and we all know that sad
tale of great expectations. But take
another look! According to Sheng-Chuan
Wu, Franz's Vice President
of corporate development, the language
has moved from research and development
/ academic / prototyping environments
to commercial, revenue-generating
applications. 'Lisp
is a good solution for lots of commercial
applications,' Wu says, 'and
it's three to five times faster
to develop applications in Lisp than
in Java and C++. In the last 10 years,
it's become a general-purpose
programming language used in many
modern and most of the time, very
complex, applications.'
Furthermore, Wu says, 'People
say 'Java is the gateway to
the Internet.' We say 'Java
is the gateway to hell.' Lisp
is just a better alternative to the
intelligent Internet: It runs on
14 different platforms and doesn't
need any type of virtual machine
because it compiles directly to native
machine instructions on all popular
microprocessor architectures.'
Investigating what's been
happening in the world of Lisp, I
found a variety of successful programs
that attest to its solid performance.
Notable among them, Ascent Technology's
mission-critical decision support
systems run the gamut of real-time
decision support for gate and ground
resource allocation,
aircraft routing, tracking and
maintenance scheduling for clients
in the air transportation industry.
According to Philippe Brou, Ascent
executive vice president and cofounder,
the attitude toward Lisp has changed
significantly over the last two decades. 'Now,
customers understand that as long
as the system satisfies all their
needs (in terms of features, performance
and reliability), the language
decision is somewhat irrelevant.' He
adds, 'We've always used
Lisp in all our decision support
applications—from our very
first system delivered 17 years ago,
to our latest personnel allocation
system, which can handle tens of
thousands of workers in real-time.'
Lisp has also evolved
from its origins as merely a desktop
application embedding both decision
logic and the GUI to a multitier
architecture that combines Oracle
on the back end, middleware layers
(XML, IBM WebSphere MQ, Java, Corba),
Web technology (JSP, Java, HTML)
and back-end Lisp decision-support
engines running on servers. According
to Brou, the more sophisticated
the system, the more probable it
is that Lisp could be used to implement
it. 'Anyone
involved with applications where
the complexity of the logic is very
high is at least likely to consider
Lisp as a viable option. Lisp provides
tremendous productivity advantages,
better time to market and easier
handling of programming fixes: It's
clearly a competitive advantage for
many vendors. It's also
easy for new programmers to learn,
so recruiting isn't a problem,
either.'
Wu listed a slew
of commercial applications based
on Common Lisp (CL) in such diverse
domains as gaming, energy and manufacturing.
Nintendo's
Super Mario
64 and Naughty Dog's
(now part of Sony Entertainment)
blockbuster games Crash
Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter:
The Precursor Legacy are
all built in CL, along with advisory
systems for nuclear power plants,
chemical plants, steelworks and others.
It was used in the automatic redesign
of the entire airframe of the new
Boeing 777, as well as in audit planning
systems. The scheduling system behind
the amazingly successful Hubble telescope
is also written in CL, as are the
scheduling systems for major airports
such as Heathrow and Atlanta, and
the logistics system deployed during
the first Gulf War. CL is preferred
by many complex bioinformatics applications,
such as SRI's EcoCyc, which
encodes and displays the entire metabolic
pathways of the E. coli bacteria,
as well as Harvard Children's
Hospital Informatics Program's
SNPper, which aids scientists in
analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Clearly, it's time to take
another look at Lisp. And, if anyone
thinks that there are no new frontiers
that can generate dynasties like
Microsoft, just listen to what Bill
Gates advised computer science majors
at MIT early this year in a question-answer
session: 'If you invent a breakthrough
in artificial intelligence so machines
can learn, that [will be] worth 10
Microsofts.'
—Rosalyn
Lum |
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Don't Be
a Fool with a Tool |
Consultant
James Hobart exhorts mobile developers
to focus on users, not technology.
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Devices aren't the key, Consultant James Hobart tells his SD West 2004 class; focus instead on usability.
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Mobile applications aren't about
fancy devices, store-and-forward protocols
or distributed objects. Just ask James
Hobart, a consultant with more than 20
years of software development under his
belt. What's critical in the mobile
domain isn't hardware or software
platforms or communications technology,
he told his SD West 2004 class, 'Designing
Mobile Applications.' Instead,
it's about people, pure and simple,
and Hobart hammered the point home again
and again: Design for the way people
do their jobs, and test your applications
with real users. He cited troubles in
one project, slated to support construction
workers in the telecommunications industry: 'One
of the things we found out about ditchdiggers
is that they have really big thumbs [audience
laughter] and tend to put devices in
their back pocket when they're
done—then sit on the tractor. We
got a lot of cracked screens in that
project.' That wasn't all,
for usability problems frustrated workers
to the point that they actually took
revenge on the device. 'That was
expensive, and a shame that a $4,000
device had to get impaled to prove a
point.'
Hobart implored designers
to step back from the focus on engineering. 'What
you want to ask yourself is 'How
does the user really use this device?',
and I think you'll be really surprised.' What
designers will often find, said Hobart,
is that a project can be scoped down
to deliver just the functionality that
a user really needs—a critical
win on small devices where every millimeter
of screen space and every tap on the
screen costs overall usability.
In the near future, Hobart predicted,
mobile devices will become adaptive,
conforming to users' habits and
expectations. Brandishing a cell phone,
he said, 'This thing is with me
18 hours a day! It's hanging out
with me more than my wife—that's
kind of scary.' Noting that privacy
and security concerns will become critical,
Hobart continued, 'These things
will know more about us, like that I
want my cell phone to route calls to
voice mail when I'm in my car,
or that I like to read my e-mail when
I'm having my morning coffee. The
question is how to use this to the user's
benefit and not be annoying,' he
continued, invoking memories of Microsoft's
infamous assistive character, Clippy. 'My
biggest fear is that there'll be
all these software products, and there
are going to be a lot of them that are
really horrible: 'Looks like it
was designed by a fool with a tool.''
—Rick
Wayne
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Bruce Schneier
Talks Homeland Security |
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Date: Wednesday,
May 5, 2004
Time: 11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET
Duration:
One hour
Click
Here to register
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Editor
in Chief Alexandra Weber Morales
interviews security and cryptography
expert Bruce Schneier, author of Applied
Cryptography, Secrets and
Lies and, most recently, Beyond
Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security
in an Uncertain World.
If you're looking
for a tech insider's
take on homeland security,
cryptographer and consultant Bruce
Schneier combines an
encyclopedic knowledge of security,
engineering, history and
culture with insight into multiple
domains. In this one-hour live
interview, Schneier will discuss
his five-step process for dissecting
security solutions, and then apply
that analysis to the FAA's
controversial Computer-Assisted
Passenger Profiling System,
national ID cards, FBI and CIA-level
data collection and mining,
Terrorist Information Analysis, e-voting
and the Department of
Homeland Security itself. But that's
not all: Schneier will spend
much of the program answering your
questions in real-time, be
they related to application development
or geopolitics. Don't miss
this special program of fresh and
uncompromising insight from
the nation's go-to security expert! Click
here to register.
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SD Best
Practices 2004 |
Save
the Date!
SD
BEST PRACTICES 2004
SD's New East Coast Conference—Returning for a Second Year!
September 20 - 23, 2004
Boston, Hynes Convention Center
Featuring
6 focused tracks:
-
Build and Deploy
- Design and Architecture
- People, Projects and Teams
- Process and Methods
- Requirements and Analysis
- Testing and Quality
Click
Here to request a conference
catalog. Full details will
be available online at www.sdexpo.com in
mid-May 2004.
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