From: "Glen F. Pankow" Date: 2009-02-25T05:22:35+09:00 Subject: Re: Nexus Programming Language Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: > Gregory Brown writes: > > ... > >> Why are you subscribed to ruby-talk if you hate Ruby so much? Is >> someone forcing you to use it? And if so, how is that our problem. > > If you were using CL (if more people were using CL), and Ruby were not > invented, more bosses would let us use CL as a dynamic language, and > indeed we wouldn't be forced to use Ruby (or worse, perl or python). > What perfidy! Won't someone loosen your chains? I bet your boss won't let you throw in lots of parentheses in your Perl code, too. > Of course, you share the culpability with perl, PHP, Python, Java and > so on. Oh, the humanity! > > But I'm mostly justified in thinking this, by the authors of most of > these languages themselves. Some of these authors are just poor chaps > not knowing better, but some other including Java and Ruby knew very > well Lisp, and instead of choosing to help develop and spread lisp, > they voluntarily chosed to create different and inferior languages, > picking only parts of lisp, and grafting over their abortive creation > some monstruous syntax. I know what you mean. I can't understand why people choose to use such inferior and wimpy regular expression engines when they could be experiencing the full power of snobol4 pattern matching. > > The fact that these monstruous syntaxes view good in the eyes of the > unwashed masses, and that the lack of features (when it's not just the > inclusion of misfeatures) is oblivious to the same masses IS NOT an > excuse. Yes, it's all bread and circuses to us. The world's morals have truly been weakened by a language that deigns to make users happy! > > The only result is that Lisp is relegated as just an elegant weapon > from a more civilized time, still mastered only by a few remaining > Jedi. And you consider yourself one such Jedi? I wonder. I sense much fear in you, young one. Every once in a while you should raise the blast shield and look around. Even a Jedi will use a Perl blaster when he needs to. > > But there is still hope! So you're the one prophesied to bring balance to the Language Force. Great! > > This is perhaps the good that will come from these evils. A lot of > programmers are now exposed on the goodness of dynamic languages, and > they may notice (or if not by themselves, *I* will try to make them > notice in threads like this), that their fad language of the day, is > actually some incomplete subset of Lisp, and then why not use the full > and authentic thing? Common Lisp is this way! Impressive, young Skyparenthesizer. And here I thought Darth Java had won the Clone/Dup/Bloat War. You will try to make us notice? There is no 'try'. You will find that leads only to the Dark Side. Isn't there a better way? Maybe you can do for CL what others have done for Java and .Net? Were you to do that, you'd have more fans than parentheses.