In article <·····@castle.ed.ac.uk>, ····@castle.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
|> In article <·················@arolla.idiap.ch> ···@idiap.ch writes:
|> >In article <·····@castle.ed.ac.uk> ····@castle.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
|> >
|> >|I sometimes think we should change the charter of Comp.lang.lisp
|> >|to say the purpose of the newsgroup is to discuss why Lisp sucks.
|> >|That's what we seem to spend most of out time doing.
|> >
|> >I must have missed those postings that said that "Lisp sucks".
|>
|> Is this a quibble, that no one said those two words?
|>
|> Just a short while ago, there was an attack on dynamic typing
|> in a couple of newsgroups. Did it miss this one? More recently
|> we've had:
|>
|> And I'm NOT pro-CL; I dislike it intensely. To recap (slightly
|> exaggerated): LISP is irredeemably ghastly :);
|>
|> Decent "functional" languages are ergonomically much nicer than
|> any LISP will ever be
|>
|> With Lisp, I get the impression that it is somewhat stagnant these
|> days.
|>
|> In my opinion, Lisp suffer from a "closed world assumption" which is
|> mirrored within the community itself.
|>
|> I think the real reason Lisp isn't widely used is because Lisp
|> developers insist on providing incredibly fancy, interactive "Lisp
|> worlds" which are nearly an operating system unto themselves.
|>
|> Copyright garbage, prompts, random garbage collector
|> messages, and chatty debuggers that pop up questions instead of dying
|> cleanly are all nails in the system programming coffin.
Those don't sound like statements to the effect of "Lisp sucks" to me.
Instead, I find they sound more like concerns about the future
development of Lisp and similar languages (permit to to place "SML" in
the category of "similar languages").
I'd like to see Lisp and similar languages catch on more in the market
place, and I'd like them to become (even more) more useful for my work.
Discussions about whether and to what degree static type systems are
useful (in addition to dynamic typing), whether the various Lisp
standards committees have their collective head stuck in the sand
or not, and how Lisp-like languaes can interoperate in a world that
is dominated by C, C++, and FORTRAN, seem like they might provide
useful feedback to people involved in the evolution and standardization
of Lisp, and they can help current users assess where Lisp
(and other, similar languages) are going.
But when people suggest thinking about how static type checkers, FFI's,
functional programming (in the sense of non-imperative data structures)
could be integrated with those other areas at which Lisp is already
good, there are frequently responses like: "you are trying to turn Lisp
into C", "well, maybe 'we' could add it, but it is clearly a useless
feature, so why would anybody bother", etc.
Fortunately, there is often also some useful discussion by people who
aren't religious in such matters, and there are often useful pointers
to literature, work, or source code that already exists. So, I hope
discussions like the ones you referred to above will continue. If
you think all they are about is that "Lisp sucks", that's too bad for
you--I can imagine you won't find them very interesting, then.
Thomas.