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I've never used CL but heard it's very "design by committee." Java is worse than JS. So yea, maybe hodge podge is actually the best option we have.
by amalgamated_inc 4y ago
I've never used CL but heard it's very "design by committee." Java is worse than JS. So yea, maybe hodge podge is actually the best option we have.
- WorldMaker 4y agoYeah, the "Common" in Common Lisp comes from committee. Lisp itself was a "basically designed overnight" language that became an incredibly popular hodge podge of a million snowflake variants and then eventually two competing attempts to standardize and clean up the hodge podge happened: Scheme (to my understanding a BFDL-like situation of a strong figure building anew, with few backwards compatibility cares) and Common Lisp (a standards committee and then some, with a bunch of backwards compatibility shenanigans to sort out). (ETA: I am a fan of Common Lisp, for what that is worth, if this sounds too critical. It's a very nice language. Some of what has made it nice was a massive committee and standards effort, very similar to the way JS has continued to evolve under TC-39 stewardship.) Also yeah, my impression of Java was that it was very design-by-committee.
- lispm 4y ago> Lisp itself was a "basically designed overnight" language Roughly "overnight" for six years: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
- WorldMaker 4y agoPer that own history, the first version "Lisp 1" was written as a project in a single University semester. Compared to the many committee years of, for instance, ALGOL, that is "basically overnight" by comparison.
- lispm 4y agoThe implementation of the first and relatively primitive version took roughly a year. McCarthy had two full-time programmers and six graduate students working for him.