----- Original Message ----- From: "Angus Lees" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Mark Johnathan Greenaway" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 10:53 PM Subject: [SLUG] Re: Revenge of the Nerds
> 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). > Yup :( I think people confuse the idea that XML is easi-*er* to read than what it is intended to replace, with "it *is* easy to read or write". > > 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" ;) > Have you ever played with REBOL? It's based on Scheme, but is not Free (yet?), $free in some cases. Not much library support either, though it has a lot of good stuff built in. Definitely worth a look I think. I recently built a small application using it, and was shocked and amazed when I took it from my windoze dev box and it ran perfectly on Linux, first go*, GUI and all. Felix * well, there was one case-sensitive filename I had stuffed up ;P -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
