Comments on: academics don’t care and industry doesn’t have the time

By: Mark Dalgarno

Mark Dalgarno — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:38:44 +0000

As a Lisp developer it’s pretty depressing that ‘mainstream’ languages still haven’t caught up with what we’ve had in Common Lisp since the early 90s. I *am* excited by greater interest in functional programing languages, particularly Clojure which has many of Lisp’s features.

By: Gregg

Gregg — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:32:47 +0000

Well said Peter. Now what did I do with that Jetpac of mine……

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:28:42 +0000

Aye its about time the boffins got there finger out,I thought computers and robots would be doing all the mundane stuff these days,and we would all have time to play with our Jetpacs and Time machines.

By: Gregg

Gregg — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:41:47 +0000

Hi Joe, thanks for the comment, some good points.

True, we have seen a rise in dynamic languages over the last 10 years however dynamic typing was also present in Lisp. What we can definitely say is that it has now become easier to use such technologies in industry without too much stigma.

I did put some thought in about the availability of frameworks and how much they are pushing us forward. For sure, they now make it far easier for people to create apps quickly and, possibly, produce more reliable applications. However, are we missing the bigger picture somehow? If not, are we saying that programming languages as we know them are as evolved as they are going to be. This I’m not sure about.

By: Joe Wright

Joe Wright — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:25:09 +0000

We’ve seen a rise in dynamic languages like Python and Ruby over the last 10 years. We’ve got much better version control systems too.

I’m not sure if language evolution is really that important when compared to the availability and proliferation of libraries.

A lot of people are annoyed that we are still using RDBMS.