Re: [Axiom-developer] Lisp

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

address@hidden wrote:
> Either you "get it" or you don't. There is no half-way with Lisp.  
> There are no words to explain what it means to "get it" until you do 
> ... and then there is no reason to explain it; you get it. 

Well ... many years ago I "got" Lisp. I told myself at the time that if 
I had to use one programming language for the rest of my career, it 
would be Lisp. And there were Lisp machines -- was it three vendors, two 
or four?

About four years ago, I got back into Lisp during a workshop on 
algorithmic composition. You know what? A couple of decades with other 
languages, especially Perl and R, convinced me that Lisp, while an 
elegant conceptual framework, was woefully lame as a *practical* 
language. And now there's Ruby.

So I saw the whole elephant. But I don't think I care to ride on it any 
more.