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Comment by draegtun | Hacker News Reader

Nice quotes.

While its "negative/funny" I'm surprised Larry Wall's famous quote about Lisp didn't make it on this list:

    Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Here's the ref: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/7700fb02a2... (the whole thread is a good read).

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I just read Coders at Work and here's an excerpt from the interview of L. Peter Deutsch about this quote:

Seibel: I think Larry Wall described it as bowl of oatmeal with fingernail clippings in it.

Deutsch: Well, my description of Perl is something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a dog. I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design -- Perl is an abomination as a language. But let's not go there. (...)

my favorite Perl quote is from Stevey (of google fame):

Sometimes [Perl] fits just right, but when it misses, the best code a human could write looks like it was produced by an agitated baboon banging its feet on the keyboard for 20 minutes.

Another gem by Larry Wall (and I mean that sincerely)

    "...By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere
    mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never
    really forgiven LISP for not catering to them."

[source] http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html

This quote seems particularly dated to me. Thanks to SBCL, PLT Scheme, Arc, and Clojure- Lisp these days is very much catering to "mere mortals". It's lovely to follow a news link from HN and see all those wonderful s-expressions :)

given that this comes from the designer of PERL, the quote is a bit tragic

I know you are joking, at least I hope so :)

Perl has many nice ideas, that were copied into other languages ... think regexp literals for example, and I know people got crazy about DSLs once Ruby got popular, but DSLs have been the norm in Perl since forever ... due to its flexible syntax and to its interpreter (see Devel::Declare ... which allows you to locally take over control from the Perl's parser ... such that you can add new syntax).

The only problem with Perl is that it wasn't supposed to be such high-level and general purpose. It was just supposed to be a replacement for grep / awk / sed. Then it got popular :)

Larry Wall is a really smart guy (I met him at the last YAPC::Europe) ... a little crazy though :) ... but he does have good ideas. See for instance this article on why Perl is the way it is ... http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

I don't know why, but I like crazy people :)

Hehe, Lisp is oatmeal, Perl is Lucky Charms...

... and all that Lucky Charm sugar gives you cancer of the semicolon.

Not to mention the negative effects on health caused by sigils. (Disclaimer: I like Perl/Lisp/Python.)

Like with most things in life... beauty is in the eye of the beholder

It's striking to me that the discussion is over 15 years old now, but the issues and arguments surrounding Lisp haven't changed much.

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