is autolisp doomed?

I have several friends that work for one of the dinosaurs I'm mentioned in other posts who are convinced that lisp, diesel, and vba are all doomed, and that the only programming language we'll be able to use is .net.

Is there any truth to all this or is it simply an urban myth? These guys are frantically thrashing about trying to find someone who will re-write all thier lisps and vba programs in .net (but like most companies, they want it for practically nothing).

I've been hearing for years that lisp was on its way out, but have never actually believed it. Too many people out there depend on it. No lisp would mean no upgrades for the bulk of thier customers, I would imagine.

So what's the real story? Anybody know what Autodesk's plans are?

Please tell me this is an April Fool's Day joke. I may cry. I just discovered Lisp.

There are no any official statements that COM support is being dropped from future versions of Windows. it is used extensively throught the OS internals. Baring full rewrite of the OS from scratch (which I can't envision any time soon), it is safe to assume COM will be there for a while.

Visual LISP uses the ActiveX COM API, so whilst that remains I doubt ADesk will drop it.

Please tell me this is an April Fool's Day joke. I may cry. I just discovered Lisp.

I wish it were. Talked to one of them today and he said that this was the biggest hold up to upgrading to a newer version. They are still on 2006 and they can't upgrade till this gets worked out. I told him there was no problem with upgrading at least to 2010 because that's what I use and thier lisp routines run on my machine, so does the vba stuff.

I suspect that this is some freakasaurus in IT who has a burr under his saddle and simply wants to either hold them back for some reason or force a change to the .net framework. Nothing goes on at that company that's not driven by someone's own personal agenda. I don't know how they've managed to stay in business as long as they have. At any rate, I didn't really think that there was any truth to this but you never know. Coming from the source this came from, I'm not surprised to find it to be false.

They also said "DOS is dead." Yeah, right. I just returned from visiting the SmartComputing website. Want to take a guess as to how many DOS related questions there are? Apparently word did not get out to everyone that the disk-operating-system had gone the way of the Dodo bird. So, my response to your question Jack would be, "No, Autolisp is not doomed. Not by a long shot."

Another reputable source on the topic:

Does the death of VBA mean I must give up (vla-) code?

is autolisp doomed

I've heard this for at least 15 years. Maybe more. And it keeps on ticking. Maybe it should be renamed Timex

I've heard this for at least 15 years. Maybe more. And it keeps on ticking. Maybe it should be renamed Timex

As have I. Never put any stock to it till the guys at the company I was talking about told me the IT department wouldn't let them upgrade till a solution for this problem was found. Sounds like an urban legend to me. Or some bean counter that don't want to turn loose of the money!

The IT department should stick to dealing with IT issues and let those in the know about AutoCAD handle that side of the equation. Do you give them advice about setting up the network or how to run it?

Yet, another reputable source:

The Visual LISP Developer's Bible, 2011 Edition

The IT department should stick to dealing with IT issues and let those in the know about AutoCAD handle that side of the equation. Do you give them advice about setting up the network or how to run it?

Yeah well, that ain't gonna happen. You see, all that is handled at the corporate level. This company has 12 or so locations scattered across N. America and Europe. The local IT guys are restricted to bringing a machine out to a desk, plugging it in, turning it on and everything else is done remotely from the corporate IT office. You get the software someone a 1000 miles away thinks you need, no more no less. If you think you need something else, you have to write a justification, then get your local manager to sign off on it and maybe sometime in the future you'll get it, or you may not. While I was there, I asked for a copy of Trueview so I could convert some drawings we got from a customer to our prehistoric version. I'd have had better luck asking for the company president's kidney. Got told that the expense would never be recovered in a reasonable time, so my request had been denied. Never mind that the only expense involved would be the 5 or 10 minutes it would have taken to install it. I tried to tell them that we needed this software because this particular customer does not submit paper drawings, that they do everything electronically and we could not read thier drawings. Long story short, my boss wound up asking me to download Trueview at home and convert the drawings there. We had used up 2 weeks of our 6 week schedule for this job screwing around with the corporate IT guys.

I worked there just short of 5 years, and even though the pay and benefits were great, I was actually glad when I got laid off.

I wouldn't say it's doomed, but it's options are becoming more and more limited. In Civil 3D or any of the other vertical products, perform a vla dump on an object specific to that platform in say a 2006 release and a more recent one and see how much less info is given. What's even more depressing is if you perform and entget on a object between the two release versions and aside from object name, handle and layer, you receive practically nothing in the later versions.

If I remember correctly Lisp was integrated into Autocad because using lists and list methods such as mapcar were benefical when working with 3D geometry. With that in mind I wouldn't expect it to be dropped without Autocad reverting to a 2D package.

I can't quote the source of the above but one of the lisp modules at college touched on the subject.

Not to mention the majority of the Express Tools would disappear unless ported into another language...

If I remember correctly Lisp was integrated into Autocad because using lists and list methods such as mapcar were benefical when working with 3D geometry. With that in mind I wouldn't expect it to be dropped without Autocad reverting to a 2D package.

 

I can't quote the source of the above but one of the lisp modules at college touched on the subject.

And it was the favorite programming language of the original creator.

From the source of why they chose Lisp

http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2008/09/an-interview--1.html