Python's Lisp heritage

[Christopher Browne]

In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, Lumberjack <lumber at jack.com> transmitted:
> aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote:
>> What's amazing about Lisp is that it's still in many ways on the cutting
>> edge of computer science.
>
> Perhaps you should name these "many ways". Taken at face value, your 
> statement pretty much claims that computer science hasn't progressed in 40 
> some years. I can at least agree with that statement. Of course the 
> "science" in "computer science" is pure bovine excrement. If you can't or 
> wont measure it, it isn't science. "Computer religion" or "computer cults" 
> would better capture the reality.

Well, after 40 years, we're still in the process of seeing features
Lisp had years ago move into the mainstream.

-> People are starting to get the idea that maybe computers are better
   at managing memory than people are, so that rather than doing it
   _completely_ manually using malloc()/free(), or getting "clever" by
   attaching it to virtual function classes, or getting "very slightly
   clever" by attaching reference counting to some allocations, maybe
   the environment should do generational GC for you.

-> Newer languages increasingly feature data structures like lists,
   hash tables, and such.

-> There has been a dramatic dearth of progression in the languages
   commonly used vis-a-vis syntax handling.  Algol (the _first_
   version) was of comparable sophistication, and likely _better_
   elegance, than most of the later languages based on it.

When looking at the more recent languages, while they may toss in
bigger libraries of "stuff," that's not evidence of them being
fundamentally wondrous progressions of the state of the art.  C++ is
newer than PL/1; is it _truly_ greatly superior, or is it just that
it's well-marketed, while nobody's pushing PL/1?

As a language, Java has little that _isn't_ in a lot of its
predecessors.  It may be nicer than C in a lot of ways, but for it to
have taken 30 years to do that seems rather wasteful.
-- 
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