Item — HN Reader

most of the ground breaking inventions / theories are "discovered" rather than invented. do you feel the same way about lisp ?

another one: lisp and c are both (rightly ?) considered peaks of language design. they both are predicated on widely different underlying philosophies. one modeling the abstract nature of computation, and the other modeling the abstract nature of a machine.

now, given the current state of development, would you consider a middle ground to be most fertile for the next big language ?

2 comments

What do you mean by "big language?" Importance (a subjective value) or most widely used (overall or for specific domains) or something else?

Lisp is a functional language, c is an imperative language. Wouldn't a language "in the middle" risk being a compromise, effectively diminishing or negating the advantages of each?

Lisp is not a functional language except in the trivial sense that it supports HOFs. Common Lisp is not even functional in the sense of Scheme, where purely-functional programming is not enforced but seems to be encouraged (disclaimer: IANAS). Common Lisp is a pragmatic, multiparadigm language in which functional, imperative and other styles can and should be used as appropriate. In a very real sense Lisp is that language "in the middle."

"LISP has a partially justified reputation of being more based on theory than most computer languages, presumably stemming from its functional form, its use of lambda notation and basing the interpreter on a universal function."

- John McCarthy, LISP - notes on its past and future (Page 1)

Conference on LISP and Functional Programming archive Proceedings of the 1980 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming table of contents Stanford University, California, United States Pages: .5 - viii Year of Publication: 1980

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802782&dl=ACM&...

Simpler phrasing: do you consider Lisp your invention or discovery?

(Which was my question, but you beat me to it.)