
A Conversation with Arthur Whitney (2009) - tosh
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1531242&type=pdf
======
avmich
> But the thing about the languages that I implement is that there are no
> libraries: those 50 operations are it. Every-body builds from there, and the
> resulting programs are extremely short.

Sounds controversial, but so often the task doesn't need much over built-in
operations (verbs).

------
pmoriarty
_" AW: I much preferred implementing and coding in LISP, but once I was
dealing with big data sets and then having to do fairly simple calculations,
APL just seemed to have the better vocabulary. It had to come up one level.
Common LISP even then had about 2,000 primitives. I didn’t like that. What I
liked was the original LISP, which had car, cdr, cons, and cond, but that was
too little. Common LISP was way too big, but a strippeddown version of APL was
in the middle with about 50 operations."_

I wonder why he didn't try Scheme. That should have fit the bill, and have
been much closer to Lisp than APL.

------
dang
Thread from 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476120)

2009 but small:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650149)

