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"Old LISPer that I am, I also looked at various current dialects of Lisp and Scheme—but, as is historically usual for Lisp, lots of clever design was rendered a
by shadowsun7 16y ago
"Old LISPer that I am, I also looked at various current dialects of Lisp and Scheme—but, as is historically usual for Lisp, lots of clever design was rendered almost useless by scanty or nonexistent documentation, incomplete access to POSIX/UNIX facilities, and a small but nevertheless deeply fragmented user community. Perl's popularity is not an accident; most of its competitors are either worse than Perl for large projects or somehow nowhere near as useful as their theoretically superior designs ought to make them."
-- Eric Raymond (Why Python? - http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882)
Raymond himself is very happily not using Lisp.
- Hexstream 16y agoThat's an article from May 01, 2000. That's 10 years ago. The situation of Lisp in that timeframe has improved by leaps and bounds. Much better documentation, many more libraries, less community fragmentation (SBCL has become the clearly-best-supported implementation), better OS integration, new exciting stuff like Clojure, etc.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- shadowsun7 16y agoI wasn't arguing that he was wrong to drop Lisp. I'm merely pointing out that - contrary to OP's assertion, it's entirely possible to find reasons to not play with Lisp even if you're extremely familiar with the language.