I'm turning into a Lisp snob

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:38:50 -0800

Reddit and StackOverflow and other websites I frequent are filled to the brim with discussion of Google's Go. The code snippet on the front page is:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}

First thoughts that ran through my head as I looked over the site:

Ugh, look at all that syntax.
Nice(r) type system (than C++ and Java). I'll stick with multimethods though.
Concurrency semantics, hmmm... Shared mutable memory between threads? I think I'll stick with Clojure for now thanks.
Where are the macros?
It has anonymous functions and closures and sort-of first-class functions? Good. Welcome to the 1960's.
len is a special operator? Sigh. (Programming language quality is usually inversely proportional to the number of special forms.)
Cool that they used Japanese in the example though. (That word is sekai, "world", obviously.)

Compared to a Lisp, this language looks indistinguishable to C, Perl, Python, Java etc. It looks like such a small incremental improvement (if it even is an improvement). Yet another imperative, for-loop-wielding, curly-brace-using, pointer-mangling, state-mutating, OOP language.

In fact via Reddit today I read this awesome post to a mailing list which compares Go with ALGOL68, and it gave me a would-you-look-at-that moment. Once you learn a few languages that are significantly different from ALGOL derivatives, all ALGOLish languages start to look eerily similar. Are we really stuck with ALGOL-derived languages being the only viable mainstream languages for all time? How much polish can we possibly apply to the same turd?

Then I realized, I'm turning into a Lisp snob. : ( Learning a Lisp apparently does spoil you for the rest of time. I am without a basis to judge whether this language will be a successful replacement of anything. All I know is I probably won't use it. Honestly I'm much more excited about new things on the horizon in Clojure. And I still have getting better at Haskell on my TODO list.

briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Go)

I'm turning into a Lisp snob