Lisp was a piece of theory that unexpectedly got turned into a programming language.
-- Paul Graham, in Revenge of the Nerds.
Question for the peanut gallery: Why are Lisps simultaneously dying and resurgent right now?
Re:And this is different from last year how?
ziggy on 2002-05-24T15:51:29
It feels more resurgent over the last year and a half than it has been over the previous decade and a half. Some of that is the popularity of Java (it's OK to GC) and the C++ STL (it's OK to want generics and "function objects").When I was in school (uphill both ways to beg for an account on the 3090 and all that), Lisp and Scheme were those two languages you had to learn to finish your degree, but would hardly ever think about as you went into the corporate world of C programming. Now, it seems like those seminal concepts are gradually leaking out of McCarthy's Ivory tower. For example, Perl5's source filters are a hacked up version of Lisp macros. I would never have thought about playing with syntax in C, but Perl is a much better language than C, and the possibilities are certainly very interesting (modulo an Acme::Bleach or two).
People want to find novel (if not new) walls to beat their heads against.
