Re: Java GOOD -- Fire BAD

["Perry E. Metzger" <address@hidden>]

Colin Putney <cputney@wiresong.ca> writes:
> On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 01:39  PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > I think the environment is changing. The possibility of selling Lisp
> > into large organizations right now is better than it has been in 15 or
> > 20 years.
> 
> I'm curious as to why you think this. I've got the same hunch about my
> favourite language - Smalltalk - but I can't really put my finger on
> any compelling evidence that this is so.

There seems to be a growing realization that languages do actually
matter. My friends in the security community point to things like
papers on why Multics was more secure than Unix (one big reason: PL/1
did bounds checks, C does not). My friends hacking on OSes are sick of
perpetual bugs with things like interrupt priority levels which better
languages would make easier. Paul Graham's essays have had more of an
impact than many might acknowledge -- hell, I'd more or less abandoned
lisp in spite of a long standing love affair with it until what he
wrote pointed out to me how dumb that was of me.

There's also the success of languages like Perl, Python, and others
for actual application deployment, even though they're slow as all
hell, just because they provide a higher level environment.

Finally, the amount of memory we're dealing with these days and the speed
of our processors make high level languages practical, (even things
like Perl!) while the tasks we're working on have gotten so ambitious
that high level languages feel more and more necessary.

I think the world is finally getting to the point where languages like
Smalltalk and Lisp are going to take over.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com