McCarthy denounces Common Lisp, Lisp, XML

Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the microphone, in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as stultifying if not mortifying, in that it ended innovation.

When rahul defended standardization as allowing his code to run ten years from now, McCarthy indicated that (paraphrasing) by the looks of Rahul it was unlikely he would produce code that anyone would want to run ten years from now.

XML had the honor of having McCarthy stop in the middle of a meandering bit of reflection to mention how much he disliked XML.

And when your correspondent asked why he had chosen such a crappy name for such a great language and whether he regretted, in what is becoming an annual rite of humiliation, he pretty much ignored my question, but did mention that his preference had been FLPL, for Fortran List Processing Language, because he liked Fortran.

Intriguingly, there is a Fortran package with that exact name and acronym and function, created in 1960 as far as I can make out from some light googling.

no exceptions

Lisp was valuable if only because it taught us so much about language and environment design. There wouldn't have been things like SML and Miranda without the influence of functional programming as found in Lisp.

But seriously, environment programming? Images? Rather than executables that are compiled from source? Get the fuck out.

>>3
Batch compilation? Get the fuck out.

>>3

What about Quantum computing??

who is rahul?

>>4
Yeah, because so many Lisp applications are distributed in, say, the average GNU/Linux distribution... oh wait, no.

>>7
Yeah, because there are so many Lisp applications to distribute in, say, the average GNU/Linux distribution... oh, wait, no. You can't possibly blame Lisp for doing the Unix Philosophy too well for Linux.

As long as names such as asswipe or brainfuck aren't used or anything else that would be ambiguous, why does it matter what name is used?

>>9
It's like judging a book by it's cover

>>8
The "unix philosophy" was never about emulating MACLISP.

>>11
Nor was it ever about writing small units that do one thing well, working together to complete tasks. No, it never had anything to do with that. And Lisp, along with image based languages in general, never dropped the hilarious third part (communication via text strings) in favor of telepathy.

Of course there never was a "unix philosophy". Anyone who says there was is just trying to cram his crap down your throat so that you'll program stuff like he wants to but is either unable or unwilling to do himself.

Let's not permit this detail to distract ourselves from this obviously worthwhile line of discussion!

Oh wow, originator of a movement doesn't dig what his followers have gone with the ideas he produced. Film at 11!

>>14
I'd watch it.

Like that one where function pointers go   around This allows   easier manipulation of   the human variable   by enabling the   programmer to pass   the values are   our data sets   ending the world   froze Completely This   isn t just   has local admins   and remote users.