<story><title>Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wanderingmarker</author><text>I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer&apos;s Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out programs on punch cards.&lt;p&gt;The &quot;high level language&quot; which shipped on every microcomputer platform of the 1970s and 1980s was Basic. I have often wondered why. Compared to Lisp, it is inelegant and inexpressive. Perhaps people who hacked larger computers of the era did not interact with microcomputer hobbyists. Perhaps it was too difficult to get Lisp fast enough to be usable on the old hardware, although if it was possible on big iron in the late 1950s, it should have also been possible on microprocessors in the 1970s.&lt;p&gt;An entire generation of programmers grew up using GOTO &lt;i&gt;&amp;#60;line number&amp;#62;&lt;/i&gt; to call subroutines and execute loops. That same generation could have grown up using lambdas. How sad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Keyframe</author><text>I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot).&lt;p&gt;However, I don&apos;t think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed.&lt;p&gt;So, what&apos;s the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently  tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn&apos;t have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later.&lt;p&gt;Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn&apos;t &quot;get it&quot; - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple.&lt;p&gt;Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all.&lt;p&gt;tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn&apos;t used more often? Everything I&apos;ve read makes absolutely no sense why it isn&apos;t. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let&apos;s not fool ourselves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;/rant&amp;#62;</text></comment>