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Message: [QUOTE="Tony Arcieri, post: 4632650"] [Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.] On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon < So your argument is Common Lisp would win by default if it were the only game in town? That's not exactly a confidence boosting argument. But I'm mostly justified in thinking this, by the authors of most of Guy Steele, famous for his "drag them halfway to Lisp" quote about Java, also spent his time making a better Lisp... in his case Scheme. But this further demonstrates their pragmatism: since it's clear that Lisps will not see widespread popularity, the next best thing is to look to Lisp for good ideas and use those in the creation of new languages. That's exactly what Matz did with Ruby. The fact that these monstruous syntaxes view good in the eyes of the The quality of a grammar isn't not inversely proportional to its size, and indeed despite the complexity of the Ruby grammar people find it not only easy to read, but easy to transform. You may wish to place emphasis on the latter as Lisp's homoiconicity makes it easier to conceptualize things like macros, but I prefer to place emphasis on the former as I spend much more time reading code than transforming it. Your "unwashed masses" find it easier to read the code of languages with complex grammars than they do to read Lisp. While you seem to attribute this to some failing on their part, I'd attribute it to Lisp's homoiconicity leading to an excess of tokens, making the language syntactically noisy. Perhaps the "unwashed masses" simply prefer their languages use a more complex grammar to eliminate some of that syntactic noise. This is perhaps the good that will come from these evils. A lot of On the contrary, I think programmers who decide to learn a Lisp and try out CL as their first are far more likely to be turned off to Lisp in general, as opposed to those who try saner Lisps like Scheme. That was certainly the case with myself, and I didn't really come to like Lisp until I tried out Scheme. I think the failure of Lisp to gain widespread popularity can largely be attributed to Common Lisp itself. [/QUOTE]

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