Newsgroups: alt.lang.design,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!lll-winken.llnl.gov!decwrl!olivea!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!waldorf.csc.calpoly.edu!kestrel.edu!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@kestrel.edu (Jim McDonald)
Subject: Re: Comparing productivity: LisP against C++ (was Re: Reference Counting)
Message-ID: <1994Dec19.220020.22851@kestrel.edu>
Sender: mcdonald@kestrel.edu (Jim McDonald)
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA
References: <19941203T221402Z.enag@naggum.no> <LGM.94Dec5075553@polaris.ih.att.com> <D0CLt9.6K3@research.att.com> <BUFF.94Dec15103904@pravda.world> <D0xAIp.3Dn@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <vrotneyD11MDv.Ks7@netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 22:00:20 GMT
Lines: 32
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c++:104058 comp.lang.lisp:16095


In article <vrotneyD11MDv.Ks7@netcom.com>, vrotney@netcom.com (William Paul Vrotney) writes:
...
|> It is interesting to muse with the powerful software automation of the
|> "software ICs" paradigm, such as NEXTSTEP, in the future perhaps the only
|> interesting programming will be consuming software ICs, producing software
|> ICs and otherwise exploratory programming.  Contrary to popular opinion,
|> perhaps Lisp (or Lisp like languages) will be one of the few surviving human
|> written programming languages of the future.

It is interesting to watch features from Lisp creep into the C community.

A decade ago I was saying that the mainstream language after 2000 is 
likely to be an evolutionary descendent of C, but will actually be much 
closer to lisp implementations of the 80's than to C implementations of 
that era.  I think the evolution of C++ has tended to support that 
contention.  (My regret is that there will be a lot of wasted motion in 
the process, witness the C++ world reinventing garbage collection.)

Even Bjarne's defense of C++ expressed pleasure at the speed with which 
some lispish features had made it into C++, and many of the implementers 
of those features were in fact Lisp programmers trying to carry their
vision of a progamming environment into C++.

Lisp has the great advantage of being based on a firm mathematical
foundation.  In the long run, the random walks taken by the C community
are likely to arrive at that same maximum in the space of programming
languages.




