Comment by magice
15 years ago
I think this essay is bull. As someone points out, it is yet another I-am-so-good-that-no-one-wants-me things that LISP people love to throw out. Maybe THIS attitude ("Lisp is Olympia and I, the proud user, is Zeus") is why.
Let's be frank, there are many many excellent languages that do not even attract enough people to have a "community." Icon always comes to mind as example: brilliant language, excellent libraries, but the only believers are myself and a professor. Other than that, Haskell, SML, OCaml have never attracted a significant number of users. They all are brilliant, right? BASH may have more serious products than those great things.
Let's face it, the true Lisp curse has not been discovered, and Lispers' attitude has helped it hide even better. I have my theories; you have yours. And mine are always more correct than yours. It's Lisp land, man. You can't argue against that.
You, a professor... and about 15-20% of anyone who came out of the University of Arizona over a decade or two. :)
I remember writing a java library to do SNOBOL/Icon-style pattern matching in college because I hated the java way so much... every once in a while, I think about doing it again.