Not surpringly, I think Smalltalk, especially Squeak, is a more productive system
for me, personally, than either C++ or Java. I've never done serious work in Lisp,
so I can't compare Lisp to Smalltalk.

Unfortunately, I think the programing team is more significant than the
language. A great team will be productive and successful with nearly
any language, a poor one will probably fail with any language. Lisp and
Smalltalk tend to attract well-educated computer scientists which may
make those languages users, as a group, more effective. But it's pretty
hard to "prove" that one programming language is overall better than
another because there's so much variability in programmers.

Thanks for the urls.

	-- John

>Hi,
>
>The article "Lisp as an Alternative to Java",
>http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/home/gat/lisp-study.html, is very
>interesting. http://slashdot.org/developers/01/09/08/0113203.shtml may be of
>interest if you what to see people's comments to the article.
>
>The question that I have is how does Smalltalk fit into this?
>
>There was an article that compared Smalltalk with C++ a few years back.
>(Anyone have a copy or know where a copy of it is? It was on the Smalltalk
>Industry Council site and may have been done by IDC?) Smalltalk won hands
>down on all counts including speed, which was suprising. The reasons for
>Smalltalk's victory? Faster development times. Less complex programs. Better
>class library that performs better. Less memory usage for large systems.
>Easier to program and understand.
>
>What do you think?
>
>All the best,
>
>Peter