On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 08:05 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
"If we don't get hardware I'm done" Microsoft's Biddle said. "I have no business wthout some fundamental changes to the PC architecture. And if people don't write software that takes advantage of those changes, I'm done" Peter Biddle, product unit manager in the Security Business Unit at M$ EWeek, 5 May 03 p 14
--- No lieutenant, your serfs are already dead. -Agent Smith
A friend of mine (I know him from talking to him at the bookstore) runs the computer book section at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Dave told me, without any promptings or comments from me, that his results for April showed that LISP books outsold C# (C-Sharp, the attempt by M$ to launch a .NET-friendly new language) by 5 to 1. Now he has a little sign posted to this effect. This is fairly amazing, as the number of LISP books has remained small for many years (Guy Steele, Sonia Keene, a few others) and M$ has subsidized the usual shelf full of crap books on C#. (I used LISP in my AI work while still at Intel, then Scheme for some years thereafter, and more recently Mathematica and Squeak (Smalltalk). Nothing I am doing depends on one language over another, though some are more convenient to use.) But if this lack of interest in C# holds, it indicates tougher sledding for M$ ahead. (I cannot recall a single mention of C# on this list, as a data point.) --Tim May