I used to love to play with LISP on the DEC-10 at IU circa 1976-1980.
But, swear to god guys, there is something about LISP that makes
workaday programmers turn and run. For 25 years I have observed that
your rather ordinary programmer types just get totally and utterly
freaked when they try to pick up LISP or SCHEME. I don't know why,
that's just been my observation.
For a language to be really successful, it has to be something that
doesn't frighten the type of guy who have a history of getting the job
done yet who don't necessarily "get it" at the deepest levels nor
consider programming to be the highest calling or the most desirable
thing to do in their spare time (as I do ;-)...
I like Tcl a lot. We used it to make the software that runs our
business, NeoSoft, Inc. It creates accounts, edits RADIUS databases,
monitors the network, sends alpha pages, extends the webserver,
interfaces to the databases, and is the basis of our Intranet.
Now we're making Win/Mac/Unix cross-platform Internet applications that
can run untrusted code simultaneously from multiple applications in one
process, multiplexing their inter-application I/O across network
connections where each participating program can act as both client and
server to many other programs that are doing the same thing. And the
code to enable all this is 18 Kbytes of well-commented,
long-variable-name Tcl.
Out here in the real world you write programs that do things things,
over and over, day in and day out, for months and years, and the things
they do are not always 100% glamorous and tend to pretty much be text
processing and communications.
I assume that one set of people will will nod and say "That is so" and
the other will say "What an idiot". Oh well...
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