(Lots of ((Irritating, Spurious) (Parentheses)))
Derisive comments are often made about the syntax of Lisp, as witness some reproaches on my previous blog entry. Thus the half-joking, half-serious backronym of Lots of (Insipid | Irritating | Infuriating | Idiotic | ...) and (Spurious | Stubborn | Superfluous | Silly | ...) Parenthesesand accusations that Lisp syntax would make ( Read more... )
Many of us have actually forgotten LISP (heh, I wrote some stuff in in for BESM-6 when I played with language transforms in the university). Pascal and LOGO, too. It is not new, by any means. No doubt, C is a glorified assembler, C++ is ugly and sometimes infuriating, and Java is a fascist's wet dream, but somehow they're still the most practical tools for doing things like operating systems, object request brokers, databases, routing software or (oh, horror) business apps. I wish it could be better, as there is clearly a lot of room for improvement (my pet peeve is that Algol-68 was undeservedly forgotten - it had lots of interesting ideas in it, some of which found their way into variety of languages; and, besides, I worked on a A-68 compiler project, which makes me impartial :) However, insisting that something which was created long time ago, well known, and found lacking by the only people whose opinions should matter for the algorithmic language research community - namely application programmers, does not strike me as a particularly constructive approach to improving the situation.
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