| ITTA’s
Lisp Users Survey was part of
an effort to assess the strengths and weaknesses of programming in Lisp as
perceived by frequent users. 369 users submitted their comments online
over a six-week period from September through October 2000. The survey attracted
Lisp users across numerous sectors both from the U.S. and abroad.
Survey
questions focused primarily on the technical pluses and minuses of
programming in Lisp. Not surprisingly, Lisp users proved to be staunch
defenders of Lisp vis-à-vis other more popular languages such as Java or
C++. User praise for Lisp focused on its strong programming environment
which was described by users time and again as the "truest"
object-oriented language available. However, to ITTA's surprise, a large majority of respondents used the
survey to express their dissatisfaction with the low profile of Lisp in
the current software market. In short, we found that Lisp has a dedicated
user community that recognizes the prejudices against it and yearn for
better marketing to bring Lisp back into the mainstream.
A full
length article on this survey is
available in the March/April edition of PC
AI Magazine. The full article is also republished online at Staff
Editorials. The
following presents some of the basic quantitative findings of the survey:
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Sector:
Survey respondents
were asked to identify themselves by sector.
The
majority of respondents came from the private sector (57%), followed by
the academic (31%) and public sector (12%).
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Frequency
of Use: The
majority of Survey participants were frequent Lisp language users, using
Lisp on a daily or weekly basis (69%).
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Commercial
Products: Just over
half of respondents indicated that their primary commercial vendor was
Franz (59%). Other
vendors included Digitool (11%), Xanalys (11%), cmucl (8%), clisp (5%),
Scheme (3%), and Symbolics (3%)
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Platforms:
Most
of the respondents indicated that their primary platform is Windows (46%).
However, Unix (30%) and Linux (17%) platforms combined exceeded the Windows
total.
Several
respondents chose two or more platforms, reflecting some of the
cross-platform issues that Lisp users face.
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Other
Languages: C/C++
(57%)and Java (41%) were the two most frequently selected languages. Perl
(22%) and Visual Basic (12%) were both strong secondary choices.
Surprises
included strong numbers for Python, Prolog, and Scheme.
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Primary
Uses: The
majority of respondents selected research or education (44%) as their
primary purpose for using Lisp. However, this number was heavily influenced by respondents
who identified themselves as working in the academic sector.
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Areas
Requiring Improvement: Graphical
User Interface (GUI) and Interoperability were the most frequently
selected Lisp programming problem areas.
This reflects continuing difficulties
relating to the development of a standard, cross-platform GUI and inherent
problems linking Lisp with other languages such as Java, Perl, and C/C++
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