The Ivory Tower saga was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Raymond Wiker once stated:
> 
> > On 26 Apr 2016, at 05:39 , Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It's probably a bad idea to dismiss anyone's experience when you haven't 
> > "walked a mile in his moccasins.", including mine.  Though my attempt may 
> > have been inarticulate, I was talking about my own experience in academia 
> > and not trying to pick a fight with every LISP coder on the planet. If I 
> > was more clever, I'd have probably had the foresight to say simply say 
> > $academic_only_language instead of using the pit-bull attack trigger word: 
> > LISP.
> 
> If you think that Lisp is an "academic only language", you probably need
> to spend a little time with actually using it.

  AutoCAD uses LISP as a scripting language.  EMACS also has a LISP.  Paul
Graham (of Y-Combinator) also made his money on LISP (Viaweb, which later
became Yahoo Stores).  So yes, it's not an "academic only" language, but it
is different enough to make it difficult to find programmers.

  Because of the nature of LISP (LISP code is itself stored as a LISP
object) it becomes easy to algorithmetically manipulate LISP code that the
default method of implementation is to write a domain-specific language
(DSL) that solves the problem you want trivially, therefore if you use LISP,
you end up with something that may look like LISP but isn't (if that makes
sense).

  -spc (Who has a love/hate relationship with LISP---I love to hate it (no,
	no, I kid!  I love the concept, but hate the language [1]))

[1]	I have the same issues with Forth [2]

[2]	Which is a backwards LISP.