Lisp is for Entrepreneurs - Part 2 (Amazon)

(tags emacs, lisp, programming, advocacy, failure)

I wrote to Bill Clementson the other day about his "Emacs Learning Curve" (I also commented on it) and he replied back quickly. One's own interpretation on the meaning of the Curve is the key here.

I also took the time to thank him on his previous article "Lisp is for Entrepreneurs". It feels like he's responding to me indirectly with his new post "Lisp is for Entrepreneurs - Part 2 (Amazon)". In it he finds another example of Lisp, in this case Emacs Lisp, being a trailblazer for Amazon. It makes me giddy to read this article. It must be programming advocacy pr0n. Gotta be careful with this stuff, it'll make ya a senseless language bigot-fanboy. That is, if you like Lisp. If you want even more masterbatory Lisp love you must see the original post Clementson quotes: Stevey Yagge's "Tour de Babel" covering C, C++, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, and Python. In it, regarding C:

You should know Lisp. If C is the closest language to modeling how computers work, Lisp is the closest to modeling how computation works. You don't need to know a lot of Lisp, really. You should probably learn Scheme, since it's the simplest and cleanest. [...]

But you choose a language for day-to-day programming based on its libraries, documentation, tools support, OS integration, resources, and a host of other things that have very little to do with how computers work, and a whole lot to do with how people work.

People still write stuff in straight C. Lots of stuff. You should know it!

Stevey Yagge sure can type a lot. I really liked his two articles "Why You Should Blog" and "Effective Emacs". One gold nugget from his "A Quick Tour of Ruby":

Python's [Read Eval Print Loop or interactive mode] is also good but a bit annoying, since you have to indent every line manually when entering multi-line expressions.

That is why Python loses. Yes in this 1% of the time you use a language, you're doing the computer's work! Any language that gets in the way of your efficiency is... annoying.

In any case I'm going to be digging into his site a little more.