Philip Greenspun's Epiphany #2
Monday, September 22, 2003
Philip Greenspun had an epiphany when he compared Java to an SUV and now he's had another one:
"... my personal preference is a much darker, uglier, and more shameful secret: Common Lisp, CLOS, plus an ML-like type inferencing compiler/error checker (with some things done in a sublanguage with Haskell semantics and Lisp syntax). Common Lisp dates from around 1982 and ML from 1984. I try to keep this preference concealed from young people who've been raised on a diet of C, Java, C#, Perl, etc. They just wouldn't find it credible that 20-year-old systems and ideas are actually better than the latest and greatest from Microsoft and Sun. Imagine my delight in running into a friend yesterday. She's a 23-year-old graduate student in computer science at Harvard. Conversation rolled around to programming tools. Unprompted she said 'What I think would be best is Common Lisp Object System with a modern type system'. I was stunned. I thought it was only dinosaurs like me that clung to Lisp. I had a second ephiphany for the week... Believing that Lisp circa 1982 plus some mid-1980s ML tricks thrown in is better than all of the new programming tools (C#, Java) that have been built since then is sort of like being a Holocaust denier."
