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From: vrotney@netcom.com (William Paul Vrotney)
Subject: Re: Love, Religion, and Programming Technologies
In-Reply-To: miller@cs.rochester.edu's message of Wed, 07 Jun 1995 11:00:36 -0400
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> In article <miller-0706951101160001@127.0.0.1> miller@cs.rochester.edu (Bradford Miller) writes:
> 
>    In article <3r3g6a$d6@maureen.teleport.com>, "David B. Lamkins"
>    <dlamkins@teleport.com> wrote:
> 
>    > What's really frustrating is that the cross-pollination of ideas is
>    > so pathetically slow, mostly because people's natural tendency is to 
>    > block out anything far from their self-perceived norm...  That's why
>    > C++ users absolutely fawn over new clever ways of writing data structures
>    > like (to quote an example from a magazine that crossed my desk today)
>    > "arrays of arrays" -- a big yawn to Lispers.  On the other side, I'd
>    > kill for a really natural interface to the underlying OS, or a GUI
>    > framework as robust as those taken for granted by C++ users.
> 
>    Don't look at it as something frustrating, look at it as a career opportunity.
>    Yes, you can take those 20 year old results from Lisp, and republish them
>    as "new" C++ results! Academic careers are made in this fashion (hint: you
>    don't have to be the author of the original result, just able to read it
>    and translate to the language de jour).
>
>    ... etc

Language de jour indeed.  Brad makes some interesting points here.  If I
know Brad (hi Brad :o)), I think he intends them with a twist of sarcasm
while cutting though to the actual truth.  I would like to add another
dimension to the language de jour concept.

It seems like not even a year has passed and here we are again with the
great "Lisp versus C debate", just different debaters.  I remember a time
when it was Lisp versus Pascal and before that Lisp versus Algol for
algorithm publications and even a time when it was Lisp versus Fortran
because those were the only two languages way back then.  And now it seems
to be Lisp versus C++.  And in the future if it turns out to be Lisp versus
x, perhaps Lisp versus Dylan, then perhaps there is a pattern emerging here.
Does Lisp keep getting rediscovered?  Could McCarthy have uncovered the last
programming language and the world just hasn't accepted it yet?

PLI advocates thought they had the answer.  I remember going to a lecture
way back then where the speaker actually announced, "PLI is the last
programming language you will ever have to learn".  I remember the Pascal
advocates though they had the answer with structured programming, "Enforces
program correctness".  And now the C++ advocates are more or less implying
that static typed objects is the answer, "The compiler will prevent any
object type errors".  Meanwhile little old Lisp just refuses to die.  Could
the implementation problems of Lisp just be a "side effect" of our primitive
technologies of the 1900s?

In the language wars Lisp represents elegance.  Don't let the world sell
elegance short.  It seems to be an enduring substance of the formulae of
science.  From time to time when the Lisp versus C debate has reappeared I
have posted this quote which I believe has something to say about the
world's acceptance of Lisp:

 "Over the period A.D. 1000-1500 the Hindu-Arab number system co-existed in
 western Europe with the Greek and Roman numerals.  Oriental science was
 brought to the west by Italian merchants who traveled in the East.  One of
 them was Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci, `son of Bonaccio') who wrote a famous
 mathematical treatise (in 1202), the "Liber Abaci", which was influential in
 introducing Arabic numerals to the West.  However, on the whole, people
 preferred the Roman numerals with which they were familiar; they had learned
 to do sums with them quite rapidly using an abacus (a counting board with
 movable counters, still in use in some parts of the world).  The public
 disliked Hindu-Arab numerals because they were strange and difficult to
 read, and the authorities opposed them because they were too easily forged.
 In 1299 Florentine merchants were forbidden to use Arabic numerals in
 book-keeping; 200 years later Roman numerals had disappeared entirely from
 the books of the Medici." 

   [Numbers and Infinity, E.Sondheimer and A.Rogerson]

Are there parallels here?  Could history be repeating itself with Lisp?

-- 

William P. Vrotney - vrotney@netcom.com
