Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: Lisp

[Joshua Haberman]

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 18:18, Tom Lord wrote:
>     > From: Joshua Haberman <address@hidden>
> 
>     > I have no desire to start a language war (honest!) but I would like to
>     > understand what Lisp offers to the landscape of programming
>     > languages. 
> 
> 
> This topic recently came up on a lisp mailing list I'm on.

What list?  If it has public archives I'd like to read that thread.

> I replied
> as follows, which most people seemed to think was a pretty good
> answer:

That is an interesting perspective.  However it seems only to address
lisp-the-community as opposed to lisp-the-language, except for the
implied idea that lisp-the-language is flexible enough to allow this
kind of language experimentation.

It also leaves me with the impression that lisp is primarily the domain
of language tinkering as opposed to being a productive tool, especially
if the language is constantly morphing.  This cannot be your assessment
though, or you would not be planning to use it for itla.  Why does
lisp's strength as a language prototyping tool/community make it the
right choice for implementing a program like itla?

Josh