

Why didn't Dijkstra like Lisp? - kamaal
http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.in/2010/05/and-why-didnt-dijkstra-like-lisp.html

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batista
Nice to know. I believed I was alone in thinking: "if gotos and self-modifying
code got such bad rep in the seventies, why is Lisp's ability to treat data as
code considered any better? How is it different from other language's much
derided 'eval'?".

Purity and functional style, I get, but writing code "on the fly" by treating
data as code seemed to me a bad style (powerful, yes, but still bad).

~~~
kls
I disagree with the whole bad meme in languages, languages are a way to
express human thoughts in terms the computer can understand. As such I don't
think that we can qualify anything as truly bad or evil moreover things can be
dangerous, complicated or abstract. People think very differently so while one
thing may be difficult to comprehend for one person, it may be very easy to
comprehend for another. I tend to subscribe to the "uncle Ben" (Spider Man
reference) theory of software development, and that is _with great power comes
great responsibility_. I personally like the power of Lisp and it certainly
takes a certain kind of thinker to appreciate it. It's not a better or worse
kind of thinker, just different. As well, I am sure there is a guy out there
that's thought process would be complemented by GOTO type procedural jumps.
There is no one size fits all languadge that is why we see so much diversity
in them.

In the two views thought you can see the age old tension of art or science in
programming. One one had it is born out of mathematics and attracts the
personality type that likes the world to be concrete. At the other end of
spectrum programming is probably one of the most expressive activities that we
humans can engage it, it is an art of pure expression, one views it
scientifically and the other views it creatively. One looks for structure and
order the other looks for freedom and possibility. Neither is right or wrong,
they just have different ambitions. Given that, it is easy to see why one
branch took root in business and the other in academia.

