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Also, why would I want to use Lisp when C has a rich sediment of practical tradition?
Yesterday I read Xah Lee's “What Languages to Hate”
1 essay and related web scrolls. It liberated me
! I realised the trickery of C and how my brain had adapted to it. C is not minimalistic, C is not a low-level language, C is a wretched and underspecified virtual machine that pretends to try to abstract most mainstream systems.
C is full of lies. C libraries pretend there is such a thing as “plain text”. C pretends to have a consistent syntax and a macro system. C pretends to give portable access to CPU datatypes. C is lies.
C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C
!
Of course like any self-respecting programmer I read SICP. And I
pretended to understand it. I bend and corrupted each sentence found in it to suit C's model. C had become a part of me, I started lying to myself. I
pretended to use Common Lisp but what I was doing was
pretend Common Lisp is C. “Good programmers can write FORTRAN in any language.”
I can't take it anymore. C is fast not because it was well-designed but just because enormous efforts have been put into its compilers. All dialects of assembly are vastly better low-level language but they're not practical enough so I will probably continue to use C, this time without deluding myself. I will also re-read SICP with a new eye.
I hope this answers your question or at least convince you that using C is neither a priviledge nor a sin: it's a penance.
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1. http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/language_to_hate.html