Lisp is the red pill
Monday, October 24, 2005
Recently, there has been a lot of hoopla about
Web 2.0. So much, in fact, that a lot of people have gotten really
fed
up with all the fuss. As part of the backlash, there was recently a
Web 1.0 conference where the agenda was "We will meet to discuss
line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new
browser window. There will be beer." ;-)
Joel Spolsky (an ex-Microsoft employee who
writes the popular
Joel on Software weblog) has recently joined in on the backlash,
criticizing the
"Architecture Astronauts" who "create" these new next big
things. If you're still reading at this stage, you are probably
asking yourself what does all this have to do with Lisp? Well, I was amused to see Joel's
latest post:
"What caused me to fly off the handle about architecture astronauts was, indeed, this conference, organized by Union Square Ventures, a local VC. You can try to read the transcript online and see why I was so agitated, or just read the post-mortem, including my ungracious comment, on USV's blog-site.Hehe, I know how he feels! ;-) A few years ago, it was J2EE and .Net. Now it's Web 2.0. After a certain point, your brain just has enough and tells you it wants something "real". Lisp is a good "fix" when you're suffering from an overdose of this sort of crap. The following quote from comp.lang.lisp is particularly apropos here:
I had to install Lisp in a Box and start working through Seibel's new book on Common Lisp until my brain started functioning again."
"Lisp is the red pill."Incidentally, if you're interested in getting "Lisp in a Box" to use for working through Peter Seibel's book, you are better off getting the version he distributes on his book site. It is not only more up-to-date than the one that Joel pointed to, it also works much better with the example code from Peter's Practical Common Lisp book.
-- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
