Re: choosing a language for your audience or macros vs syntax?

[Geoffrey Knauth <address@hidden>]

On Thursday, Nov 14, 2002, at 09:24 US/Eastern, Shriram Krishnamurthi 
wrote:

> As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the
>   power continuum, he knows he's looking down.  Languages less
>   powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're
>   missing some feature he's used to.  But when our hypothetical Blub
>   programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he
>   doesn't realize he's looking up.  What he sees are merely weird
>   languages.

I'll step in here since I am a Blub programmer.  I have this huge Blub 
program that I know will be shorter when I reimplement it in Lisp or 
Scheme.  Why do I know this?  Well, I've done some experiments, after 
having been exposed to JScheme and seen what could be done with it.  
And I've used Emacs for two decades, and clearly Emacs has tremendous 
power because is was not written in Blub.

As a Blub programmer, I've also run into Blub's limitations, and I need 
to break free.  But I have to do that on my own time and then prove [to 
management] that Blub is a waste of time, because officially it's OK to 
think in Blub, but dreaming about better Lisp-worlds is considered mere 
play, especially in a down economy.

Lisp saves time, but to prove it takes more time.  To program in Blub, 
you just need to go with the flow.  To program in Lisp, you need not 
just brains, but also courage.