--Originally published at Computer Systems Engineering
The article, Lisp: good news, bad news, how to win big was written by Richard Gabriel and originally published in 1991.
Troughout the lecture I could grasp that at the time this was written, Lisp was very popular and used but then it got really bad reputation for many reasons like problems withing the language and also how people talked about it damaged its image a lot.
There were a lot of things done right with Lisp that may have inspired a lot of other languages to do the same like standarization, it had good performance, good integration to coexits with the different programing languages that existed, and of course you could do object oriented programming.
Then there were all those things that Lisp failed at, the most remarkable are:
- Simplicity — the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
- Correctness — the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
- Consistency — the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
- Completeness — the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.
It had a different philosophy for this things that at the end of the day didn’t sit well with most. Other things it failed at were that, even thought it might have seem easy to build things with it, it was not that simple to make good programs, there were a lot ofmistakes people could make about the declarations, implementations and bad data structures.
This is a good article to reflect about
(I don’t get this meme cause i’ve never used lisp before but if someone have they might find it funny so…)
