
Lisp Is Not an Acceptable Lisp (2006) - tosh
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptable-lisp.html
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kazinator
> _If Lisp were acceptable, then we 'd all be using it._

What if 5,697 languages were deemed acceptable? Would each and every one of us
be using all of these 5,697 programming languages?

There is nothing that we _all_ use; does that mean there is no acceptable
language at all?

> _Every single non-standard extension, everything not in the spec, is "wrong"
> with Common Lisp. This includes any support for threads, filesystem access,
> processes and IPC, operating system interoperability, a GUI, Unicode, and
> the long list of other features missing from the latest hyperspec._

Portable libraries which make those things look the same to the program are
possible and exist in Lisp. (We go from "which Lisp?" to "which Lib?").

Some pretty successful languages do not have threads, processes, IPC, Unicode
and other features. C and C++ have threads now, but this is very recent. No
GUI, no Unicode, no IPC. Who cares? For decades there have been cross-platform
libraries for those kinds of things.

Sticking a GUI into a language is risky. Suppose ANSI C had standardized a GUI
interface in 1989. Would that be of any use today? Likely the API would just
be a dead-weight that is ignored (if not an outright hindrance to innovation).

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qwertyuiop924
You can always get free upvotes by linking to one of Steve's articles.

But I'm not complaining. It's still a good article.

