Franz Responds To The Failure Of Lisp Post - What Platform Will Own Web 3.0?
I took Franz and other Lisp companies to task a few weeks ago in a posting I wrote: The Rise Of Functional Programming: F#/Scala/Haskell and the failing of Lisp:
It’s hard to understand where it came from. Certainly one can argue the broader academic community had nothing to do with it, the old guard Common Lisp hackers are still as fickle and as judgmental to new comers as ever. Also, the old standards in Lisp languages, Franz and LispWorks have not lowered their prices to anything approachable to the casual developer.
Well, I got this email from a Franz representative in response:
Hi Brandon,
My name is Bernard… Very interesting blog, and it does look like you are still working with Lisp, and surprisingly, Semantic Web, too. Any chance you will be down in San Jose for SemTech 2008 this month?…
… I did see the post on Lisp. While we do need to run a business and stay afloat, it’s also in our best interest to have more interesting Lisp and ACL based projects out there. Give me a call if you would like to continue using ACL in your projects and we should try to work something out… I can also set up a temp license if you are interested in our RDF triple store AllegroGraph (http://agraph.franz.com/allegrograph/). The v3.0 release should be in a few weeks and will support both federation and social network analysis tools.
http://agraph.franz.com/support/documentation/3.0/reference-guide.html#header3-65I am looking forward to talking to you.
First off, dangling the temping temp license for v3.0 of AllegroGraph is not playing fair. I have always been impressed with Allegro’s work in the semantic space set even before it was a popular buzz word. In fact, the same thing that led me to attempt to solve the Semantic problem with Lisp is what led to the same for Franz. If the semantic web and reasoning engines are to become reality, especially on parallel processing architectures, Lisp has to be at the front of the bus. Certainly, others will try to claim they do this just fine with interpreted OO languages with some runtime tweaking - but the problems facing us in the future demand we think differently about how we even construct algorithms to solve our problems. Brute force coding and heavy stacks are not going to get us there.
However, the fact that I’ve always admired it from afar is part of the discussion in my article linked above. It seems simply out of reach for mere mortals to use and incorporate in to their own development plans because of price. Certainly, Allegro deserves to be compensated for their hard work - this isn’t kids hacking PHP for the next Twitter reporting app after all - Allegro has always tackled the big problems where they can contribute value. Not the same thing can be said for many software companies out there.
Regardless, flirting with applications using this model is harkening back to the era of big client-server installations instead of quick and nimble collaborative innovation. As much as Allegro’s marketing may say that AllegroGraph is “Web 3.0″, the principles that drive it are not going to allow its success to be pinned to large engines running in a back room of a well funded company. If I get addicted to the software Allegro has - there is no remedy to bring in on board in my work.
This isn’t to say that Allegro hasn’t opened up to the community - they have opensourced good libraries - although through another license scheme, LLPGL. It also seems they are using the IBM model of “Community Driven Development” I complained about before when IBM released Project Zero to put “PHP on Rails”. They take contributions to fold back in to the Allegro products.
Although I really like working close with Allegro and writing about their accomplishments in this space, I challenge them to think if this is truly the model to gain traction in the coming Web 3.0 world. I would wager the Lisp community should still effort to create more nimble and open components for the semantic web - the internet will demand no less when picking it’s platform for Web 3.0.
