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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's been written somewhere that the longer you work on anything the bigger the chance that you'll have a bug-ridden implementation of lisp in there somewhere...

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Greenspun's Tenth Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule):

  Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, 
  informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Any sufficiently complicated Lisp program contains ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of the top 100 perl modules.

That sounds funny, but how true is it? Let me use http://ali.as/top100/ as a list of the top Perl modules. #3 on the list is Pod::Escapes which I suspect is not implemented in very many Lisp programs at all.

I think it's pretty true. That list is heavy on "plumbing" modules that are pulled in as dependencies. I don't know a good one that's more indicative of what programmers deliberately pull of the shelf for a project, which is what I was talking about.

Let's remember Greenspun used TCL for his commercial work.

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