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It is illuminating to read the output of such minds as Kent Pitman, Dan Weinreb, David Moon, Richard Gabriel, Rodney Brooks, Guy Steele and what they have to sa

It is illuminating to read the output of such minds as Kent Pitman, Dan Weinreb, David Moon, Richard Gabriel, Rodney Brooks, Guy Steele and what they have to say about Common Lisp and the standardization process, in places such as comp.lang.lisp (the entire archive can be found online) and elsewhere. The depth and clarity of thought, the foresight, the attention to detail and the guiding principle of trying to find the "right" vs the "easy" solution (this is beautifully illustrated in "worse is better" by RPG). Compare and contrast with the designers of today's popular programming languages. There is something severely lacking in the minds behind PHP/Javascript/Python/Ruby and other languages where projected popular appeal and "easy" is the prime design consideration. Are we worse off? I think so, not just for technical reasons, but because we have lost something greater that can not be easily put into words.

todd8 8y ago
Yes, the evolution of Lisp was guided by brilliant people. I regret throwing out so many of my old Computer Science related books over the years (e.g. the Interlisp Reference Manual) because the few that remain remind me of the history of programming that has occupied so much of my life. While being nostalgic about the early days of programming languages, I am not as pessimistic about the current state of the art. There were plenty of old programming languages that have faded away despite being important in their day (IBM's PL/1) and lots of work on new languages is pushing in interesting directions (Haskell, Idris). Common Lisp has hung on and perhaps survivor bias has made it seem special, but to me, it is special. While working with it I feel that I am working with a language of the future from the past. The landscape of calculation is much bigger than it was half a century ago, when I started programming. It is populated by an enormous ecosystem of processing units from tiny to enormous, embedded to networked across the planet, with single processors to high performance multiprocessors. All of this is controlled by programming and the programmers that wrestle the world of computing into submission. In this Hobbesian ecosystem some languages have prevailed for many years, like Java and C, others have survived even longer like FORTRAN and LISP, and some have simply proliferated rapidly, like Python, all for reasons that are complex and involve human abilities and computer architectures. Not all of them are beautiful, Lisp is, but all of them have a place even if only to reveal what does and doesn't work.

todd8 8y ago

Yes, the evolution of Lisp was guided by brilliant people. I regret throwing out so many of my old Computer Science related books over the years (e.g. the Interlisp Reference Manual) because the few that remain remind me of the history of programming that has occupied so much of my life. While being nostalgic about the early days of programming languages, I am not as pessimistic about the current state of the art. There were plenty of old programming languages that have faded away despite being important in their day (IBM's PL/1) and lots of work on new languages is pushing in interesting directions (Haskell, Idris). Common Lisp has hung on and perhaps survivor bias has made it seem special, but to me, it is special. While working with it I feel that I am working with a language of the future from the past. The landscape of calculation is much bigger than it was half a century ago, when I started programming. It is populated by an enormous ecosystem of processing units from tiny to enormous, embedded to networked across the planet, with single processors to high performance multiprocessors. All of this is controlled by programming and the programmers that wrestle the world of computing into submission. In this Hobbesian ecosystem some languages have prevailed for many years, like Java and C, others have survived even longer like FORTRAN and LISP, and some have simply proliferated rapidly, like Python, all for reasons that are complex and involve human abilities and computer architectures. Not all of them are beautiful, Lisp is, but all of them have a place even if only to reveal what does and doesn't work.