Re: member returns list

[Emanuel Berg]

"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>
writes:

> Given how accepted and mainstream lisp is, I can
> perfectly imagine a universe where it would be
> totally ignored and where we'd lose all
> its offsprings.

Some of the novelties that were introduced and/or
refined in Lisp are perhaps mainstream today, in other
languages and systems, but Lisp is not.

Actually it is totally marginalized. I know this from
reading job ads for one. Out of a hundred ads, there
is tons of Java, a lot C#, some web programming in
different languages, some SQL, and one or two oddball
projects and leftovers in C, C++ or even
older languages.

But there isn't *a single* ad for a Lisp programmer!
Even in the non-commercial world, very, very few young
programmers turn to Lisp. Even the
"functional programming" goofballs at the universities
most often do Haskell and not Lisp (or ML).

> For example, Backus, of BNF and Fortran frame, wrote
> a paper about functional programming in 1959!
> You can bet it would still be ignored if lisp hadn't
> shown the path with a garbage collector and high
> order functions, and if it hadn't existed to develop
> ML and from this all the functional programming
> language to Haskell nowadays.

We can bet all we want but never know for sure.
Even the premise "no Lisp" is dubious. Because, why
was there a Lisp? Say, there was a Lisp because of
factors A, B, and C. Now, if we are to remove Lisp
from history and then figure out what the world of
today would have looked like, should we not only
remove Lisp, but also A, B, and C? But if we do that,
how do we know they didn't create something else, in
parallel with Lisp? Should we remove that as well?
It is like a dough, or a tree, rather than the linear
chain of events as you put it. Nothing can ever be
removed or inserted that is there or isn't there.

> Similarly for the web. Without lisp and the
> interface builder (a macintosh program written in
> lisp originally, and therefore doubly dependent on
> lisp (from the
> lisp->smalltalk->parc->apple->lisa->mac and from the
> lisp->dynamic-programming->UI paths), you wouldn't
> have had nextstep where it was easy, obvious and
> trivial even, to develop html and WWW
> server/browser, given the building blocks available.
> The alternative at the time was Xanadu on the
> hypertext side, SGML on the document side, and
> gopher on the client/server side. They could have
> spend tens of years trying to mix two or three of
> those into something vaguely ressembling the www,
> without lisp and NeXTSTEP.

I'm surprised you haven't mentioned XML. No Lisp, no
XML, right?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573