September 22, 2003
Dark Shameful Secret

Phil Greenspun: Lisp diehards = Holocaust deniers:

Actually my personal preference is a much darker, uglier, and more shameful secret: Common Lisp, CLOS, plus an ML-like type inferencing compiler/error checker (with some things done in a sublanguage with Haskell semantics and Lisp syntax). Common Lisp dates from around 1982 and ML from 1984.

I try to keep this preference concealed from young people who've been raised on a diet of C, Java, C#, Perl, etc. They just wouldn't find it credible that 20-year-old systems and ideas are actually better than the latest and greatest from Microsoft and Sun.

This is not news. It's just that some people pay attention to Phil Greenspun.

Posted by jjwiseman at September 22, 2003 02:04 PM
Comments

There's something funny in having "people who've been raised on a diet of C,..." not being able to accept that 20 year old systems are useful.

Posted by: Michael Hudson on September 23, 2003 07:28 AM

Just for the record, I'm a young person (first year Uni) ensuring his friends know at least of the existence of Lisp, Haskell &c. Mainly because I ramble of on things I know about whether I want to or not, though :)

Posted by: Tristan on September 24, 2003 01:47 PM
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