Sigh. This blog post again. At least it's been posted with the "2006" date in the title, but some of the problems: 1. The title is catchy and provocative, but

Sigh. This blog post again. At least it's been posted with the "2006" date in the title, but some of the problems: 1. The title is catchy and provocative, but it should really read "Common Lisp is Not An Acceptable Lisp". "Lisp" by itself is a family of languages, not a single language. Most of the blog post is dedicated to attributes of Common Lisp specifically. The title always struck me as a bit disingenuous and link-baitey, especially since his very first point is about how there are multiple different Lisps. 2. Which implementation of Common Lisp are you talking about? There are several, and when you talk Haskell "kicking its ass all over the performance map" because of the type system, it's helpful to know whether you're talking about CLISP (an interpreter by default), or SBCL (a Lisp compiler, and one that is highly focused on speed.) 3. CLOS looks weird to people who are used to "object oriented" languages like Java, sure, but it's much more true to the nature of object-oriented programming as a whole. I'll refrain from pulling out the old Alan Kay quotation in which he (the father of the term "object oriented") identifies Lisp and Smalltalk as the only two OO languages that he's aware of, but CLOS is much more true to the spirit of OO programming than any other system I've worked with (except perhaps Smalltalk)[0]. 4. "There is no acceptable Lisp". In 2013, this is utter nonsense. I'll give Yegge the benefit of the doubt when it comes to 2006, but even still, it's rather frustrating to read 3000 words (yes, I counted) about the shortcomings of Common Lisp, and then suddenly the author jumps to the conclusion that all Lisp dialects are equally bad, with no supporting evidence. I have my fair share of frustrations with Common Lisp. The spec shows its age in many ways, and I really wish it had a number of features that I like about modern Lisp-like languages like Racket[1] - dialect scoping, hygenic macros, optional typing, etc. But I cringe when I see links to this post in 2013. For a blog post that's so long, it's surprisingly spare on evidence that supports the argument presented in title or the conclusion, even if it gets a number of things right along the way. [0] As pointed out below (thanks, cwzwarich), Kay's quotation mentions Lisp (not CLOS by name), so it's a jump for me to assume that it implies his support of CLOS specifically. That said, if you implemented OO-programming (as Kay defined it, not as Gosling defined it) in Lisp in the most straightforward way possible, you'd end up writing something that resembled CLOS. [1] I say "Lisp-like" to pre-emptively deflect any debate over whether or not Racket is a "true" LISP (it certainly isn't a true Scheme, because it is not fully compliant with any single Scheme standard; it uses a hybrid of R5RS and R6RS) EDIT: Okay, here's the Kay quotation: "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them. " (http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...)