Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 00:04:23 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu, molter@logic.it, adrian@obiwan.psinet.net.au, vas@vas.tomsk.su, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: To UNIX or not to UNIX ;-). Was: PPP problems. Message-ID: <17960.866444663@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 16 Jun 1997 01:52:34 EDT." <199706160552.BAA16911@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
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> I personally am going to speak up for Guile, because Lisp is a great > language. It's a fine language, one which I'm a big fan of, but it's still just not practical to expect everyone to learn it. FORTH falls into a similar category: powerful but arcane. The number of people who can write truly competent ELISP, for example, can probably be counted on two hands, and remember that emacs has been out for many years now. If there was not a significant learning-curve to lisp then it probably would have taken over the world already, QED. LISP has also already more than had its chance to become *the* interpreted language of choice and, instead, we've seen things like BASIC brought out of retirement before we've seen a general movement to LISP. What does that tell you? That all programmers are stupid? Perhaps, but such conclusions are hardly valuable. :-) TCL's rapid success, and after only a comparatively recent introduction, only demonstrates that there is still a need for more simplistic procedural languages, TCL being something which can be learned in about an hour by any reasonably competent programmer - it's a language of truly trivial implementation and scope. I also know about GUILE's plans to put a mini-C environment on top in order to pave over these issues, but I haven't seen that bear much fruit yet. It's still just an idea. Jordan
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