Fanciful Magic

We can hope...
I gleamed this post from my pragrammatic programmer list:

>From: "Perry E. Metzger"
>To: Colin Putney
>CC: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
>Subject: Re: Java GOOD -- Fire BAD
>Date: 20 Aug 2003 20:26:53 -0400
>
>
>Colin Putney writes:
> > On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 01:39 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > > I think the environment is changing. The possibility of selling Lisp
> > > into large organizations right now is better than it has been in 15 or
> > > 20 years.
> >
> > I'm curious as to why you think this. I've got the same hunch about my
> > favourite language - Smalltalk - but I can't really put my finger on
> > any compelling evidence that this is so.
>
>There seems to be a growing realization that languages do actually
>matter. My friends in the security community point to things like
>papers on why Multics was more secure than Unix (one big reason: PL/1
>did bounds checks, C does not). My friends hacking on OSes are sick of
>perpetual bugs with things like interrupt priority levels which better
>languages would make easier. Paul Graham's essays have had more of an
>impact than many might acknowledge -- hell, I'd more or less abandoned
>lisp in spite of a long standing love affair with it until what he
>wrote pointed out to me how dumb that was of me.
>
>There's also the success of languages like Perl, Python, and others
>for actual application deployment, even though they're slow as all
>hell, just because they provide a higher level environment.
>
>Finally, the amount of memory we're dealing with these days and the speed
>of our processors make high level languages practical, (even things
>like Perl!) while the tasks we're working on have gotten so ambitious
>that high level languages feel more and more necessary.
>
>I think the world is finally getting to the point where languages like
>Smalltalk and Lisp are going to take over.
>
>--
>Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com


Personnally, I think we are far off from this happening, but it is looking more hopeful...Maybe it's the lists that I'm on and most of the folks are fans of dynamic languages (lisp, smalltalk, perl, python, ruby, etc). It would be too cool to use a dynamic language at work most of the time (right now, I use Smalltalk for scripting tasks and making my life easier). Hell, I think it would cool to work in lisp for a bit....=)