🚀 go-pugleaf

dahlman@cs.colostate.edu (eric dahlman):
> The truth of the matter is that Lisp is very hard to defend against
> people who don't really understand it because many of the features
> that make the hard things in programming easy (like all the ()'s) seem

Is this what you say to your students? - you won't understand why it's
worthwhile to learn until you spend years working with it.  Just trust me. 

I managed to find Perl very useful in hours - not years.

> I always chuckle to myself when I hear people defending their
> language against that evil which is lisp.  Because they don't realize
> that that is where their favorite language is going...

Outside of CS classes, I indeed haven't used Lisp.  However, I believe there 
are several reasons for this.

o Larry Wall.
o Out of all the jobs I've looked through on jobsearch sites, I have yet to see
one needing someone experienced in Lisp.
o I've never been searching for a program to accomplish a certain task and run
across Lisp code.  Whether or not this is because few people use Lisp or it
doesn't have many networking tools/mods, I cannot be certain.   I get the
feeling that Lisp is simply waiting to be dropped into it's already dug grave.

I suppose if it does the job for someone, great.  But the problem lies in that
it doesn't seem to be doing the job for very many people - and a rarely used
language is a dying one.

I could be way off base here.  If this is the case, it's strange that I rarely
hear about Lisp being used in real world applications.  Perhaps I'll read
through a lisp newsgroup sometime to see what apps besides classroom
assignments, if any, it's used for.
--
Mike Grandin