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It was not just "timing" that killed Lisp (if one can even say that Lisp is dead -- I use it in my day-to-day work, and I am not alone). While the world's Lisp
by betterunix 14y ago
It was not just "timing" that killed Lisp (if one can even say that Lisp is dead -- I use it in my day-to-day work, and I am not alone). While the world's Lisp hackers were working on lofty AI dreams, the world's Unix hackers were spreading C to every college, university, and business out there. Had an open, portable, low-end OS like Unix been written in Lisp, I suspect the programming world would be a much different place today.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 14y agoThat is what I tend to think. Although this is a bit off-topic rant, I really enjoyed using Turbo Pascal, before C took over in the PC world as well. So thanks to UNIX/C being spread the way they were, better languages got a hard time being accepted in the mainstream. And we are still paying with security exploits C's success. At least static analysis of C code seems to be becoming a common trend...
- brudgers 14y agoThe article suggested that Lisp innovation was dead, not Lisp itself. Written before Clojure was a viable option (per the author's comment in this discussion), that's a pretty easy position to defend. Whether moving Lisp to the portable JVM and adding concurrency and other features it offers counts as innovation, is a matter for reasonable discussion.