Lisp Is Not an Acceptable Lisp (2006)

> If Lisp were acceptable, then we'd all be using it.

What if 5,697 languages were deemed acceptable? Would each and every one of us be using all of these 5,697 programming languages?

There is nothing that we all use; does that mean there is no acceptable language at all?

> Every single non-standard extension, everything not in the spec, is "wrong" with Common Lisp. This includes any support for threads, filesystem access, processes and IPC, operating system interoperability, a GUI, Unicode, and the long list of other features missing from the latest hyperspec.

Portable libraries which make those things look the same to the program are possible and exist in Lisp. (We go from "which Lisp?" to "which Lib?").

Some pretty successful languages do not have threads, processes, IPC, Unicode and other features. C and C++ have threads now, but this is very recent. No GUI, no Unicode, no IPC. Who cares? For decades there have been cross-platform libraries for those kinds of things.

Sticking a GUI into a language is risky. Suppose ANSI C had standardized a GUI interface in 1989. Would that be of any use today? Likely the API would just be a dead-weight that is ignored (if not an outright hindrance to innovation).

You can always get free upvotes by linking to one of Steve's articles.

But I'm not complaining. It's still a good article.