The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. They at least had the advantage of not being forced to design a language for a failed st

The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. They at least had the advantage of not being forced to design a language for a failed startup, to be easy to learn where that's defined as resembling C, and other asinine considerations people continue to take into account nowadays. These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the firt to admit I'm not claiming otherwise, but the birth of Lisp was a paper written by an AI researcher that had good thought poured into it, not something meant to look like C and be good enough for whatever its purpose was on a strict time schedule. ...and it's virtually dead. Why would that matter? Why does every language need to appeal to many people? Why is that a desirable quality? There's still plenty of APL being written. I even have an article concerning this: http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08 http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08 Who could have predicted that? Ada was designed to be implemented efficiently and understood easily. It's harder to write a good C or C++ compiler than it would be to write a good Ada compiler; there's simply fewer people doing this and GNAT is popular. The only compiler I'm aware of for C that anyone actually uses, sans the behemoths of GCC and Clang/LLVM, is tcc, and almost no one uses that. There's more Common Lisp implementations that are actually used than there are for C and the only reason you'd see more C compilers for Ada is because it's a smaller language with a standard that lets the implementor get away with doing so little at the cost of every program written in the language and because the standard for a C compiler is so low that it's expected to have bugs. The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness. When you start judging something in computing by its fitness, it reminds me of a virus, and that reminds me of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook and its description of C and UNIX. C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence. I don't know what you mean by this. Common Lisp doesn't care how code is loaded and Ada has a nice with and use system. I do know C++ is a gargantuan language where the very grammar is ambiguous and is parsed differently by different compilers and I'm also aware it has little in static analysis due to this. Debugging Common lisp is simple due to its interactivity and Ada was designed to be statically-analyzed. Part of why I mentioned APL, Lisp, and Ada is because I use all three of these languages. I could care less what the masses use. Do racecar drivers care about the people driving vans? Vans are more popular than racecars. Why should computing be different?