At Fri, 24 May 2002 13:17:03 +1000, Mark Johnathan Greenaway wrote: > On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 05:30:53PM +1000, Angus Lees wrote: > > http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html > > the later points in the description of "what made lisp different" > > (about 1/3 of the way in) exactly describes several "emerging" > > commonalities i've been seeing in recent languages, but i hadn't been > > able to put into words until now. > > Yes, I thought the same. It's a pity that LISP's syntactical form, > the inefficiency of poorly written LISP programs and a general lack of > library support often makes it as popular among programmers as a leper at a > beauty pageant.
one of my most recent realisations was while thinking about topics for the upcoming docfest. the more i thought about it, the more i realised that DSSSL and XSL/XSLT are *THE SAME LANGUAGE*. all they've done is reencoded it using XML/XPATH-speak instead of the concise lisp parenthesis notation. from my (small amount of) XSL knowledge, the variable scoping, flow-object output structures, etc are all pretty much identical. everything old is new again (and its corollary: many new things were already old ;) and now they expect humans to read and write XML instead of lisp, and think thats an improvement (grumble). > Still, I live in hope that Python will continue to evolve to the point where > you can do all of the clever things in it that you can do in LISP with less > outlandish syntax and library support for everything. And we seem to be very > nearly there. i mostly agree. the big thing holding me back from python is closures. once python gets proper anonymous, lexically scoped subroutines things will start to look up. alternatively, we could all just start using lisp now and skip the next decade or so of language "development" ;) -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
