Subject: Re: Is LISP dying? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/27 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3142042939583312@naggum.no> * Richard Enwol <greon@best.com> | evidence that Perl and Python are doing fine: we can estimate popular | interest in a language by measuring newsgroup traffic. but what are they talking about? the reason MS-DOS became a success was that all its users were dissatisfied with it and had to hack all sorts of useless little trinket programs to make it approach usefulness. the reason Perl has become a success is quite similar: it is obviously useful, so people start using it, but it is fundamentall braindamaged, so everbody has a good idea for some improvement, the acceptance of which makes the system as a whole less useful, but boosts the ego of whoever suggested the improvement and makes him a loyal user. the more bugs a design has, the more visible it thus is. the more it just works and thus how invisible it is, the more people don't talk about it. by such measures, that which simply works right, does not get popular, and that which is fundamentally broken so people keep complaining about it, gets very popular. #:Erik -- suppose we blasted all politicians into space. would the SETI project find even one of them?