Hacker News Reader

It took 50 years for popular programming languages to catch up to Lisp, and in some ways we're still not there yet.

So the point of programming language research is to come up with ideas for the practical programming languages of the next 50 years to steal.

ah, the old lisp argument again ;)

So the point of programming language research is to come up with ideas for the practical programming languages of the next 50 years to steal.

More generally, one point of research is to come up with ideas for practical technologists of the next 50 years to steal.