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Comment by JoelMcCracken | Hacker News Reader

If I had to guess, he thinks this way because he isn't yet used to thinking about space-free tail calls. In that sense, he's correct -- you really couldn't create a usable reduce if the function grew linearly in the size of the list. However, this is not a restriction that we actually face.

It amazes me how some programming language authors seem to be clueless about really major areas of our field.

If I ever were to design a language, it would only be after studying all of the various interesting programming languages. How else can you be certain that you aren't doing something that hasn't been done before?

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It amazes me how some programming language authors seem to be clueless about really major areas of our field.

Guido isn't the only one. Andrew (the submitter/author of this post) once told me a story of how Brian Kernighan told him Scheme had too many parentheses and is too strange and functional to be useful (take that with a grain of salt - it's a paraphrase of a paraphrase). I've also yet to see any non-Smalltalker/Erlanger language author understand the importance of OOP in the sense of creating encapsulated objects which can be hot-swapped at will. As far as I can tell, this was the point of OOP as Alan Kay saw it. Java-style "reload the VM to reload objects" being called OOP is just painful.

If that always happened, there would be almost no new langs ever.

Again: definition of a gentleman computer scientist: Some one who knows enough to write a new programming language, but doesn't.

"It amazes me how some programming language authors seem to be clueless about really major areas of our field."

I saw Larry Wall speak within the last year or so about Perl 6. His presentation on the stuff inherited from Perl 5 was solid, but when he started talking about the other things that were more functional and/or "like Haskell", there was a marked change in his confidence and depth of description. I saw him go to dinner with some people organizing the talk and when asked about what other languages he had studied besides Perl, I recall his answer was something along the lines of "well, lots of Perl is written in C." I came away with the impression that he didn't study other languages in order to improve Perl, and the more functional stuff in Perl 6 was coming from somewhere else.

I've talked with Larry about Pugs. He knows Haskell.

I came away with the impression that he didn't study other languages in order to improve Perl....

That's an unfortunate impression. I've worked with Larry for several years, and he's most assuredly a polyglot, as are many of the other Perl 6 developers.

Just be glad Guido knows how to write a parser.

Be glad the author of a major programming language has the decency to read Levine and the first 3 chapters of the dragon book?

O industrial PL designers, how easily we let you off the hook.

I think the guy who had the misfortune to create newLisp caught more flack than Guido, Matz and Larry combined.

If you want a lot of people to hate your language, name it "somethingLisp". The CL people will hate you because it's not CL, the Scheme people will hate you because it's not Scheme, and everyone else will hate you because it has parentheses.

ISLisp.

Find anyone who hates it :-)

This is another standardized Lisp that even Common Lispers and Schemers respect. The ISLispers were the Trotskyists persecuted by the DoD backed CL Stalinist politburo. They had a beautiful Lisp that reconciled all the Lisp differences without sacrificing good taste. However, it was a high-level design that left too many details to the whims of implementers, and would have been impossible to stay compatible to without active and deliberate cooperation.

There you have it. And I must go now to board a chopper to to an Alaskan rehab/work program for my reactionary accusations against the U.S. Department of Defense, and the venerable X3J13 ;-)

EuLisp may have a similar story?

Yes; ISLisp was an international effort (EU + JP + some U.S. delegates) while EuLisp was purely European (France and UK.)

Also, EuLisp is a more divergent dialect, and even more ambitious than common lisp; it had ML style modules, continuations via let/cc, generic LAMBDA (yes, first class anonymous methods!) full support for TCO and other goodies. EuLisp was an ideological successor to LeLisp (which was ancient and fugly) and I consider both the academic dabblings of one Christian Quinnec, Lisp designer extraordinaire.

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