Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: jeff@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: parens
Message-ID: <DLC3o8.C4F.0.macbeth@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <qijg2dn775v.fsf@lambda.ai.mit.edu> <DL31FF.6vn.0.macbeth@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <OZ.96Jan16114649@nexus.yorku.ca>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 16:40:55 GMT
Lines: 49

In article <OZ.96Jan16114649@nexus.yorku.ca> oz@nexus.yorku.ca (ozan s. yigit) writes:
>Jeff Dalton:
>
>   I have a curious story.
>
>	[story about a strange language elided]
>
>i am not sure about the moral of the story. i think it is something like
>"if an extension language is implemented and usable, someone will use it"
>or "some people choose cambridge polish notation even if they do not like
>lisp or scheme" or "lingustic choices are environmentally biased" or
>"people choose/reject things for reasons more complex than expected"
>etc. :]

I'd say one moral is that hostility to Lisp can be for reasons that
do not carry over even to very similar languages, which suggests that
it can probably be overcome by relativly small things: finding a
sufficiently small, fast, and easily embedded implementation; changing
the syntax slightly; not calling it "Lisp". 

Unfortunately, it's difficult to determine what the actual reasons
are.

In this case, I'm not sure what the _actual_ moral is (so to speak),
because I don't understand why things happened as they did.  I think
it's true that

 "some people choose cambridge polish notation even if they do not like
 lisp or scheme"

Micro-prolog provided some examples: people who preferred
micro-Porlog's Lisp-like syntax to the Edinburgh Prolog
syntax that most other implementations use but who didn't
much like Lisp / Scheme.

It's probably also true that 

  "if an extension language is implemented and usable, someone will
  use it"

However, in this case views (against Lisp, but favorable towards this
other language) were on display before the language was put in as the
extension language.

I'm not sure about environmental bias or the complexity of reasons
in this case.

-- jeff

