On 1/1/06, Paul Scott <address@hidden> wrote:
Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
Art Hixson wrote:
Over the years I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of
Fortran, Cobol, assembly for a variety of machines, Forth, Rexx,
Modula, Python. While Modula is syntactically perfect and Python, as
its descendant, is pretty nearly so, they still have a rather old
fashioned feel and while useful aren't particularly interesting.
That's an interesting observation, given that LISP is probably older
than all of the languages you mention :)
Fortran was invented in 1954. The implementation of LISP began in Fall
1958.
All of which brings up the following point: if, as Han-Wen (and
others) have pointed out a number of times on the list, LISP was
around almost from the beginning, then why was it that so much of the
world's computing infrastructure got built in Fortran, Cobol and C and
that, later, sitting in computer science classrooms in the 1990s I
(and probably a whole generation of other American high school
students ... dunno about Europe or Canada or Japan) was lead directly
away from the functional-interpreted paradigm and directly towards the
compiled, C paradigm?