Subject: Re: Lisp's future
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 26 Jan 2004 09:33:31 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3284098411103058KL2065E@naggum.no>

* nepheles@myrealbox.com (Nepheles)
| Where do people feel Lisp is going? How will popularity change? Is
| Lisp threatened by upstarts like Python? Will Lisp become more
| acceptable for general application development?

  Common Lisp will always be there for programmers who need to work out
  the solution while coding and watching the computer work on the data.

  Common Lisp is already not for the kind of people who obsess about the
  details of implementation and the machine resources used, so as the
  machine resources continue to be less important to the development of
  software solutions, Common Lisp should become more and more suitable
  for solution-oriented programmers and projects.

  What keeps Common Lisp from becoming BEOL/ENDOL¹ is that it represents
  data in memory very differently from other languages, particularly
  those designed by people of the static type analysis persuasion who
  mistakenly believe that the recipient of a bag of bits is satisfied
  that it was what he advertised that he wanted and therefore does not
  require any work to ascertain its validity on the receiving end.  When
  static type people understand that interaction with computers that are
  not under the spell of the omniscient compiler is fraught with danger,
  they resort to things like XML instead of waking up from their denial
  of the real world.

  What has to go before Common Lisp will conquer the world is the belief
  that passing unadorned machine words around is safe just because some
  external force has «approved» the exchange of those machine words.

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¹ BEOL/ENDOL -- the mythical ultimate programming language
-- 
Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway                                      2004-026

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.