Re: Macros and little languages

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

> Re: infix versus prefix. I have more faith that you could convince the
> world to use esperanto than prefix notation. But by all means, have
> another go at it. Maybe it just needs one more try!
> 

I don't have to convince the world, just the best programmers.
Whatever they use, many others soon use, whether they 
like it or not.  E.g. wizards at Bell Labs design C for their
own use, write Unix in it, C becomes default language--
even though it was not designed for (and indeed is quite
dangerous in the hands of) mainstream programmers.

As for having taken multiple tries, it is not merely common
for advanced technologies to take decades to be adopted by
the mainstream, it is the default.  If anything, the takeup
of Lisp ideas has been encouragingly fast.  15 years ago, 
mainstream programmers were using C, and we Lisp hackers
were trying to convince them that dynamic typing and gc
were good ideas.  Now you have advanced so far that our
only remaining gripes are the lack of macros (which I think 
will be found to require prefix notation), the pointless
traditional distinction between statements and expressions
(which Javascript and Smalltalk have already tossed, and 
Perl at least hides), and a few other minor bugs and
restrictions accumulated in the process of getting the
answer by successive approximations instead of using the
closed-form solution.

--pg