Subject: Re: Lisp is alive
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1996/09/27
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3052849568663014@naggum.no>


[Cyber Surfer]

|   While you and I may appreciate the elegance of the traditional Lisp
|   syntax, anyone new to Lisp will _not_.

Fact: people discover Lisp all the time, and enjoy it, play with it, use
it.

Fact: people discover your articles, and think that Lisp is dead and that
only whining losers would use Lisp if it _were_ alive.

If you want to hurt Lisp even more than you already have, go on, whine and
complain and portray Lisp as the last remnants of a class society bemoaned
only by the withering nobility.

If you want to help Lisp thrive and become what you whine and complain that
it is not, leave it to people competent and in position to do something
about it, don't destroy their chances at success by poisoning their well.

You said you were writing a Lisp to C system for your own use.  Embellish
it to produce that abominable C++ code your _environment_ wants as input
from you.  Nobody should be interested in the tools you use as long as the
product you deliver meets the (tacit and explicit) requirements that would
have been met if you had used the tools they think you're using.  I know
this works, because this is how I moved to programming in Lisp from menial
labor in C and C++.

#\Erik
-- 
Those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.