Paul Graham

In Lisp, you don't just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward your program. As industrial designers strive to reduce the number of moving parts in a machine, experienced Lisp programmers use bottom-up design to reduce the size and complexity of their programs. However, Lisp gives you much broader powers in this department, and augmenting the language plays a proportionately larger role in Lisp style-- so much so that Lisp is not just a different language, but a whole different way of programming. The experience of Lisp programming suggests a more cheerful way to phrase this law: as the size of the group decreases, the productivity of individual programmers goes up.

So, just in case it does any good, let me clarify that I'm not writing here about Java (which I have never used) but about hacker's radar (which I have thought about a lot). But for what it's worth, as a sort of time capsule, here's why I don't like the look of Java: 1. Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. It could be that a language promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed by a committee for a "mainstream" audience, hyped to the skies, and beloved of the DoD, happens nonetheless to be a clean, beautiful, powerful language that I would love programming in.

Today Lisp is the scripting language of two moderately popular systems, Emacs and Autocad, and for that reason I suspect that most of the Lisp programming done today is done in Emacs Lisp or AutoLisp. Programming languages don't exist in isolation. I often have a feeling that I'm sending the processor on a lot of wild goose chases, but I've never had a good way to look at what it's doing. If we can develop a new Lisp that is a real hacker's language, I think hackers will use it. There's no reason a new Lisp shouldn't have string libraries as good as Perl, and if this new Lisp also had powerful libraries for server-based applications, it could be very popular.

Ten years ago, writing applications meant writing applications in C. But with Web-based software, especially when you have the source code of both the language and the operating system, you can use whatever language you want. Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub. And to support this claim I'll tell you about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other four languages. It's hard to say whether the program is no longer written in Lisp, though, because to translate this program into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter: the source files of all the page-generating templates are still, as far as I know, Lisp code.