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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Things that made perfect sense in the 1970s, are not set in stone for all time.

In the case of Lisp those things, from the 1950s to the 1990s, have rationales. Updating the names to 2010s fashions just means we'll have something that people can't understand in the 2020s and that they can't check the history of.

So in 2020 people will have forgotten the etymology of print or format, rendering them nearly meaningless while princ, car and cdr endure?

That's rhetorical, you don't need to reply.

So you think we're better off just giving up on a perfectly good reason for these naming conventions and call "princ" "print" just because some poor language without the concept of Read-Eval-Print Loop named its function that way and then everyone else blindly followed?

Seriously, Lisp has long history and had half the "new amazing features of today" 30 years ago. There is a rationale for naming conventions. Just because you're free to call a string-spitting function "print" in Ruby or Pascal or whatever doesn't mean you can do it in a language with a proper REPL.

Alternative to 'princ' doesn't have to be 'print', it could be any of 'print-out' 'output' 'put' 'write' 'write-output', and that's just off the top of my head (yes, several of these can be ambiguous and might have different meanings, but still better than 'princ').

Just because CL has a long history, it doesn't mean that everything about it has to be correct. Otherwise why start a project of CL remodernization in the first place?

Yes. Of course I wouldn't characterize it as blindly following so much as being able to rationally step back with some perspective and identify some trends as positive.

Lisps are a beautiful and powerful family of languages, but you are conflating the implementation with the idea. The names of functions from 30 years ago are not what makes Lisp special.

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