- First name: Bryan 
  
- Last name: Bentz 
  
- Email address: REMOVED
  
- Home page: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bentz/ 
  
- Phone number(s): (860) 536-1477 
  
- Postal code: 06378 
  
- City: Stonington 
  
- Country: USA 
  
- Organization(s) you work for or study at 
 (please supply the name and city for each organization): 
  
Bentz Engineering, LLC, Stonington 
  
- Fields of interest 
 (e.g. computer linguistics, numerical analysis, business software, 
  medicine, bioinformatics): 
  
natural language, "Strong AI" research, consciousness, automatic programming 
  
- Have you written any Lisp-related papers? If so, please supply 
 bibliographical references (and URL's, if possible). 
  
Yes, but it's been too long to recall much of that. 
  
- Have you developed or participated in the development of any 
 Lisp-related programs or libraries? If so, please supply a URL, 
 if possible. 
  
Yes: BBN's Parlance product (natural language), BBN's Prism product (a 
modeling tool) 
  
- Lisp variants you have used (e.g. Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan): 
  
Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp (does that count?) 
  
- Lisp variants you're currently using or intend to use in the 
 near future: 
  
Common Lisp, Scheme 
  
- Lisp implementations you have used 
 (e.g. CMUCL, Lispworks, Allegro Common Lisp): 
  
Allegro Common Lisp, Kyoto Common Lisp and descendants, VAX Lisp, MACLisp, 
  
- Lisp implementations you're currently using or intend to use 
 in the near future: 
  
Allegro Common Lisp, MIT Scheme 
  
- Computer platforms on which you're using or deploying Lisp: 
  
Windows 2K, XP PCs. 
  
- Number of years of experience with Lisp: 
  
~25 years 
  
- Do you use Lisp: 
 - at work (if so, how much) A little 
 - for study (if so, how much) No, at least not yet. 
 - as a hobby (if so, how much) Some, partly to teach others 
  
- Are you using Lisp as much as you would like to? 
 If not, why not? 
  
No.  The reason is mainly that it isn't trivial to develop real applications 
with most Lisps out there (engineering/delivery issues, not language limitations).  The 
one exception might be the new Allegro Common Lisp, but the last time I 
looked the price was something like $7K. 
  
- Do you see any obstacles to further Lisp growth (if so, what 
 is the biggest obstacle in your opinion)? 
  
Primarily the reason given above, that it isn't easy to produce a well- 
behaved application and deliver it to end users, and with some lisps it seems 
impossible.  This is entirely an issue of implementation detail - language 
authors seem to not worry too much about the final steps in packaging an 
application, and offer only options such as delivering a full lisp 
environment, and concerns about the practical issues surrounding garbage 
collection are often not addressed (and hey, what end user will mind a GC in 
the middle of his work?)  
  
Some lisps (and I'm thinking of KCL, and AKCL) were also hard to debug in - 
the stack consisted of C frames that had been the result of translation, so 
one had to sort of infer what the Lisp had been.  This may have changed, or 
they may have been other ways to work around it, but it was sufficiently off- 
putting that I didn't spend much effort on it. 
  
- Would you be interested in a Lisp-related job or contract work? 
  
Yes. 
  
- Is your organization interested in hiring Lisp programmers? 
  
Probably not for the foreseeable future. 
  
- Are you currently participating in Lisp-related meetings?  No 
 If so, where and how often? 
 If not, would you be interested in such meetings?  Perhaps