Comment by plinkplonk
15 years ago
Thank You. Now I understand what you are trying to say but am having trouble seeing the logic supporting that assertion.
How is lisp so much "more powerful" than (say) Haskell (or Erlang ) to such an extent that problems which are technical issues in Haskell or Erlang are "social issues" in lisp? It seems to be that without some serious convolutions wrt "power" to fit a pre existing bias, lisp is hardly "more powerful" than Haskell ,or SML (or erlang or smalltalk or J or even Lua).
Most of these lisp "power" comparisons seem to focus on easy to beat up languages like PHP or Java and not so much the better designed ones like Erlang or Haskell, which have vibrant communities and plenty of interesting software written in them. Is lisp really "more powerful" than Erlang? or Mozart/Oz? or Haskell?
I suspect pg's ideas of language success depending on the energy of the main Open Source contributor + mainstream programmers aversion to S-expressions may be more accurate.
Maybe all we have to do is wait a year or two and see which of Scala or Clojure dominate on the JVM. The founders of both are very talented and energetic.
If you are right, Clojure should end up "more powerful" than Scala but having (relative to Scala) this "problems which are technical issues in Scala are social issues in Clojure" dynamic. I somehow don't see that happening though.
> If you are right, Clojure should end up "more powerful" than Scala but having (relative to Scala) this "problems which are technical issues in Scala are social issues in Clojure" dynamic.
Part of that is because Clojure isn't starting from scratch when it comes to conventions; there are strong admonitions as far as avoiding side-effects, favoring composable functions over macros, and re-using functionality from the JVM where appropriate.