Subject: Re: Why learn Lisp
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 26 Aug 2002 05:28:36 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <3239328516484763@naggum.no>

* Charlton Wilbur
| And even then, designing a new language does not necessarily mean rejecting
| all that has gone before.

  After you know what has gone before, you can be more intelligently creative
  than when you start out from scratch.

| Did Bertrand Meyer discard what he had learned from other languages when he
| designed Eiffel?  Did Bjarne Stroustrup discard what he had learned from
| other languages when he started down the path that led to C++?  Did
| Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson discard what they had learned when they
| created C?  Of course not.

  Of course not.  Were they 18-year-old whining loners who craved attention
  for their inventions created in a vacuum?  Of course not.  Do you know
  anything worth beans to anyone else when you are 18?  Of course not.

| Still, it's hardly surprising that comp.lang.lisp doesn't care.

  So far, the willingness to listen does not even extend to Paul Graham's Arc.
  Novices with a desire to reinvent the world before they know what it is like
  should take notice of this.  Improving on Common Lisp is /very/ hard.  And
  most of the "improvements" on Scheme are neither improvements nor Scheme.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.