From: Conrad Schneiker <schneik@...>
Date: 2001-04-24T13:41:26+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14135] More modern in some ways than Python

FYI: What follows is an interesting (and in my experience, not notably
uncommon) example of a comp.lang.python discussion of other languages.

Douglas Alan wrote:
> 
> "Andrew Dalke" <dalke@acm.org> writes:
> 
> > >See Guy Steele, "Growing a Language":
> 
> > http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/wadler/gj/Documents/steele-oopsla98.pdf
> 
> > >"We need to put tools for language growth in the hands of the users"
> 
> > That tools is the C (or Java) implementation, no?  Otherwise growth
> > into forms like Stackless and Alice never would have taken place.
> 
> That's a good thing too, but Steele is specifically talking about
> in-language extensibility.
> 
> > > There are numerous reasons.  The fact that the others are not
> > > widely used, are not tuned for scripting, do not have as elegant a
> > > syntax, are not as easy to learn, are not available on every
> > > platform known to man, do not start up in a fraction of a second,
> > > do not come with a huge library of useful tools, etc., are all
> > > salient reasons.  And yet there remain others.
> 
> > How does this jibe with your statement that Lisp
> >    "even though it was invented in the '50's, ... remains
> >     today one of the most modern of languages."
> 
> It's a very modern language (more modern in some ways than Python,
> multimethods and a sophisticated meta-object protocol being examples
> of two very modern features that it supports), but the Lisp designers
> went in two different directions, neither of which was the right thing
> to do to achieve world domination.  This is one of the tragedies of
> the ages, if you ask me.  Half of the Lisp folk went and did Common
> Lisp.  The market for this was people who want to spend lots of money
> on big bloated developments systems that rub your back and massage
> your feet while you are programming.  The other half went off and did
> Scheme, laboring hard on making a language so small and simple and
> pure and clean that no one would ever use it for anything real.  Both
> halfs thus relegated their lovely works to ghettos -- the Common Lisp
> folk the A.I. ghetto and the Scheme folk to the academic/functional
> programming ghetto.  Lisp also has a funny syntax that give some
> people indigestion.  It looks like this:

[Rest of long post snipped.]

-- 
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)