Re: Is Lisp a Blub?

On Jul 9, 4:52 pm, "josephoswal...@xxxxxxxxxxx"
<josephosw...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At one time or another, Cobol and Visual Basic have both been much,
much more popular than Lisp. They were designed so that "anyone" could
write contemporary business applications. Their popularity certainly
doesn't seem to correlate with being able to solve what I would call
real problems.

Cobol and Visual Basic have definitely been used to solve a lot of
problems. Whether they were "real" problems is a question of
judgement, I guess.

I do not like Cobol or Visual Basic (well, I don't actually know
Cobol). But did becoming popular make them WORSE languages than they
already were?

(ps Dan Barlow has an interesting point about signal to noise ratio I
found interesting, but I'm wondering if you have anything more than
that.)

I.e., better odds that someone is working on exactly the same thing
that you are, meaning lots of competition for people to do your task,
and lots of replacements for you because all you are doing is using
the most common tool to do the most common task.

What if you are using a common tool to do an uncommon task?

The secret to success is to know stuff that *few* people know. That
has very little to do with programming languages.

If success has very little to do with programming languages, why
bother with Lisp instead of Java or C# or VB or something else?

-jimbo


.

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