- First name: Christophe 
  
  - Last name: Rhodes 

  - Email address: REMOVED

  - Home page: http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/      

  - Phone number(s): +44 7729 383 757 
  
  - Postal code: N1 0QY 
  
  - City: London 

  - Country: United Kingdom 

  - Organization(s) you work for or study at 
   (please supply the name and city for each organization): 
    City University, London 
    Goldsmiths College, University of London 
  
  - Fields of interest 
   (e.g. computer linguistics, numerical analysis, business software, 
   medicine, bioinformatics): 
    Computational Music 
    Numerical Analysis 
    Astrophysics and Cosmology 
    Program Translation and Compilation 
  
  - Have you written any Lisp-related papers? If so, please supply 
   bibliographical references (and URL's, if possible). 
   C.S.Rhodes, Maintaining Portable Lisp Programs. 
    <http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/papers/features.pdf> 
   C.S.Rhodes, Grouping Common Lisp Benchmarks. 
    <http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/papers/benchmarks.pdf> 
   A.P.Dejneka and C.S.Rhodes, Efficient Hardware Arithmetic in 
    Common Lisp (in preparation) 
   W.H.Newman and C.S.Rhodes, Cross-Compiling Common Lisp (in 
    preparation) 
  - Have you developed or participated in the development of any 
   Lisp-related programs or libraries? If so, please supply a URL, 
   if possible. 
    SBCL, <http://www.sbcl.org/> 
    McCLIM, <http://clim.mikemac.com/> 
    Gsharp, <http://www.common-lisp.net/project/gsharp/> 
    (plus various bits and pieces here and there) 
  
  - Lisp variants you have used (e.g. Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan): 
    Common Lisp, Scheme 
  
  - Lisp variants you're currently using or intend to use in the 
   near future: 
    Common Lisp 
  
  - Lisp implementations you have used 
   (e.g. CMUCL, Lispworks, Allegro Common Lisp): 
    SBCL, CMUCL, OpenMCL, CLISP (in roughly descending order of 
    frequency) 
  
  - Lisp implementations you're currently using or intend to use 
   in the near future: 
    Mostly SBCL 
  
  - Computer platforms on which you're using or deploying Lisp: 
    Unix (including MacOS X) 
  
  - Number of years of experience with Lisp: 
    Common Lisp: 4 
  
  - Do you use Lisp: 
   - at work (if so, how much) 
     Yes, enough 
   - for study (if so, how much) 
     Kind of 
   - as a hobby (if so, how much) 
     Yes, lots 
  
  - Are you using Lisp as much as you would like to? 
   If not, why not? 
    I get a mostly-free choice of tools, so I can use CL where I 
    think it's appropriate. 
  
  - Do you see any obstacles to further Lisp growth (if so, what 
   is the biggest obstacle in your opinion)? 
  
    What is 'Lisp growth'?  Are we counting number of users, number 
    of paid users, number of jobs on dice.com?  Or are we talking 
    evolution of the language itself?  Ironically, I think the 
    answer is similar: a certain defeatist attitude, coupled with 
    nostalgia of the good old days when all the clever people were 
    in one room at MIT, among the -- shall we say -- elders in the 
    community. 
  
    In addition, I would say that the most public face of what 
    people might laughably assume to be the 'Lisp community' -- that 
    is, comp.lang.lisp on USENET -- is largely filled with 
    reactionaries, to the point that, whenever even compatible 
    change is discussed, whether to business models or to the 
    language, a torrent of negativity issues.  To an extent this may 
    be the crux of the problem: letting the quest for perfection get 
    in the way of achieving anything at all. 
  
    I would also add that comp.lang.lisp evidences a certain (I 
    think irrational) hostility towards Free-as-in-Libre software. 
    Maybe this is people smarting about the fact that their business 
    model doesn't work; maybe it's people worried about the survival 
    of their Lisp vendor; I don't know.  But this hostility does 
    seem to come across to the younger programmers, who take this as 
    a community (ha!) consensus and devote their energies elsewhere 
    as a result. 
  
  - Would you be interested in a Lisp-related job or contract work? 
    Possibly.  The Lispiness of it wouldn't be the deciding factor; 
    an uninteresting project in Lisp is still uninteresting. 
  
  - Is your organization interested in hiring Lisp programmers? 
    Not specifically. 
  
  - Are you currently participating in Lisp-related meetings? 
   If so, where and how often?  
    London, 1-2 times a month 
   If not, would you be interested in such meetings?