SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.
-- Philip Greenspun, March 2007
I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
-- Paul Graham, November 1983
One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.
— John McCarthy, Inventor of Lisp, "Early History of Lisp"
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
— Philip Greenspun, often called Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming
Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list.
— Kent Pitman
Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.
— Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language
LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that the GNU project always prefers.
the greatest single programming language ever designed
-- Alan Kay
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
— Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
QuickBASIC does everything C++ can do, only backwards and in high heels.
— Bob Merkin (with apologies to Ginger Rogers)
Forth isn't just a programming language. Or a development environment. It's a cult. People encounter Forth and leave their families and sell the house and car because the moment they first understand what Forth is and how it works, Forth is the only important thing in the world for the rest of their lives. What other high-level language gets a big write-up in Rolling Stone?
There is something New in programming hardware and software. For the last ten years, it's been possible to compute numerical and mathematical problems, and get your answers with incredible speed unmatched anywhere in the solid-state electronic world, using synthetically sequenced DNA in a petrie dish. The first problem that got answered with DNA computing was a many-mode Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). DNA, of course, has been computing incredibly big problems at incredibly fast speeds since nucleic acid-based life began; it's how it reproduces life nearly error-free. But nobody ever thought to use this astonishingly powerful computing potential on human-conscious tailor-made problems before.
3 comments:
Once upon a Time, I did a brief stint at the Maritime Academy, and was, for a time, quietly, property of the United States Navy.
Did a bit of programming for them, in Fortran and C++, not because I really knew anything about those languages, but because I was about the best celestial navigator they'd ever seen, and I understood how to make computers take into account unpredictable things like tides and weather.
I think thats the thing I will regret on my deathbed.
The Maritime Academy doesn't own the Heavens, and they don't even own all the computers. It's sort of difficult to skipper large ocean-going vessels without the Academy's help and approval, but the other stuff -- you don't need no steenkin Maritime Acacemy.
In the late 1960s, Charles/Chuck Moore had a job programming computers to steer government radio telescopes and optical telescopes in the Southwest. (Well, I mean, you point telescopes at where you compute where you know Things are in the Heavens.) He was so frustrated at the programming languages available (Fortran) that he just ignored them and wrote his own language, which became Forth.
After he left, the telescope facility hired a part-timer, Elizabeth Rather, to maintain the huge amount of code Moore had left behind. At first she was horrified that some loonie had filled the computers with a strange language that looked like nothing she'd ever seen before.
But then she noticed that she was spending less than half the time each week maintaining Moore's loony Forth code than at any of her other "normal" computer facilities. She quickly became Moore's first Forth disciple, and since then together they've been evolving Forth into products for all sorts of other applications. There are even some CPU chips which "speak Forth" as their instruction set.
I'm really seriously thinking of cramming either Forth or Lisp into the new Vleeptron supercomputer. Because I think I'm an Alien. (See cartoon of the Forth Alien above.)
It's not my fault QuickBASIC is extincting. And it's not BASIC's fault either.
But now I want to learn something really elegant, a powerful language very smart people really love and admire -- not just the language that "everybody uses" in the "serious corporate and government environment" these days.
Oh, also I got to get a grasp on Java. I want to see a couple of my programs running on the Internet.
Forth is elegant, I've seen it. It even looks nice on the page.
There is a difference, though, between programming that points radio telescopes to passively listen to the heavens, and programming that is used to destroy other human beings.
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