Who were the opponents of Lisp?
in [Lisp]
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From: Tamas K Papp on 25 Mar 2010 04:28 On Thu, 25 Mar 2010 08:15:42 +0100, Kazimir Majorinc wrote: > Informally, many people criticize Lisp. Some best programmers I know > easily dismissed it because "they do not like parentheses." But who of > programming celebrities or theoreticians were enemies of Lisp? Are > there any influential anti-Lisp book or article, scientific or not? > > I know for Dijkstra - he harshly criticized Lisp in few manuscripts he > distributed, and partly - but only partly - rehabilitated in one article > someone recently posted somewhere (on Reditt?) Did he wrote any formal > or more detailed text about that? Anyone else? > > (I ask about Lisp generally, not Lisp dialects) It is well known that speech therapists are the greatest enemies of lisp. Cheers, Tamas
From: Waldek Hebisch on 25 Mar 2010 06:24 Kazimir Majorinc <email(a)false.false> wrote: > Informally, many people criticize Lisp. Some best > programmers I know easily dismissed it because > "they do not like parentheses." But who of programming > celebrities or theoreticians were enemies of Lisp? > Are there any influential anti-Lisp book or article, > scientific or not? > Look up "Typeful programming" by Luca Cardelli. At the beginning (in few sentences) he criticizes dynamically typed languages with Lisp beeing prominent example. However note that critique is not the goal of Cardelli and is only tiny part of the article. His main goal is to promote advanced types systems. -- Waldek Hebisch hebisch(a)math.uni.wroc.pl
From: Mark Tarver on 26 Mar 2010 07:51 Some comments about Turner et al. 1. A lot of the assertions made for and against Lisp masqueraded, and still masquerade, as purely scientific assertions, delivered from the top of the mountain. However if you examine these assertions they actually contain strong value judgements. It's generally important to see them for what they are and isolate them. 2. One of these was the attack on the procedural elements of Lisp- this was Turner's complaint. From an educational point of view - teaching functional programming - having a language that allows escape into C-like idioms is not a help. The other weakness is that formal verification of programs becomes more difficult. The British theoreticians were much influenced by maths and logic and felt these aspects were very important. It is also true that these procedural elements are very useful on occasion to *mature programmers*. Hence there was a value gap between the experienced Lispers and the theoreticians about what was important and why. 3. Generally the Lisp community did not answer these challenges at the time they were aired. I think partly because people like Milner/ Turner etc. are very clever and therefore intimidating. Also because the best Lisp people were focussed elsewhere (Symbolics). This meant that they ceded intellectual territory at university level, and the effects took over a decade to come through. 4. Part of the reason for Turner's attack was that Lisp style prior to SICP could be pretty awful. Few people knew how to write decent abstract code and that, and the poor performance of machines, meant that destructive operations abounded in Lisp code. A sample from Chang & Lee (early 70s) of a resolution ATP is quite horrendous code. Turner's Miranda was beautiful, but impractically slow. Mark
From: Alex Mizrahi on 26 Mar 2010 08:07 KM> Informally, many people criticize Lisp. Some best KM> programmers I know easily dismissed it because KM> "they do not like parentheses." But who of programming KM> celebrities or theoreticians were enemies of Lisp? Stephen Wolfram counts? http://groups.google.com.ua/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/f3b93140c2f2e922?hl=en&dmode=source&output=gplain From: Kent M Pitman <pit...(a)world.std.com> ---- I'm not sure this is precisely the forum in which to log this fact, but since Fateman is telling historical stories I wanted to add one. I was in Pasadena at one point, visiting a friend at Caltech, and popped in to see Wolfram around the time he was gearing up to write SMP, I think. If I recall, he was 19 at the time. People around me informed me that though he was very young, or maybe because of it, he was on track to win a nobel prize of some sort. I myself worked for the MIT Macsyma group at the time as an undergrad, perhaps my first senior year, so I think I must have been a year or two older than him. He told me that Lisp was "inherently" (I'm pretty sure even after all this time that this was his exact word) 100 times slower than C and therefore an unsuitable vehicle. I tried to explain to him that this was implausible. That he could probably construct an argument for 2-5 that he could at least defend in some prima facie way, but that 100 was ridiculous. (This was in the heyday of Maclisp when it had been shown to trump Fortran's speed, so probably even 2-5 could be refuted, but at least taking a position in that range would have left him with some defenses in a debate. He didn't cite anything credible that I recall to back up this factor of 100 problem. I tried to explain why and was not clear why a person smart enough to "maybe win a nobel prize" couldn't entertain a discussion on the simple set of concepts involved, whether or not schooled in computation. It was quite frustrating and he seemed impatient. ----
From: Tim Bradshaw on 26 Mar 2010 12:32
On 2010-03-26 12:07:45 +0000, Alex Mizrahi said: > Stephen Wolfram counts? He may have had some mileage a long time ago, but I can't imagine anyone who'se used Mathematica would pay much attention now: it's not really an example of good language design. (In fact, based on the documentation, and although I find it a fine system for my current domestic use, I probably would not consider it for serious use as the possibility that I might have to deal with someone whose head is that big would put me off.) |