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From: norvig@sequoia.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the Lisp wave?
Message-ID: <10252@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 16 Jan 91 23:23:11 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: norvig@teak.berkeley.edu ()
Organization: UC Berkeley CS
Lines: 15


No.  Lisp is not dead.  In fact, it is thriving: Scheme is being taught
to freshmen in a number of the best Universities, and they will have
increasing influence as time goes on.

Lisp is a survivor.  FORTRAN is a few years older; COBOL a few years
younger.  All three have flaws, but persist because they have significant
user communities.  

Like Algol, Lisp is more than a language, it is a style of languages.
Algol itself is dead, but the ideas live on in Pascal and Modula.
Similarly, any language with dynamic types, garbage collection, and
functional closures is in some sense a dialect of Lisp.  So if the world
adopts ML, or Haskell, or some yet-to-be-defined variant, then the influence
of Lisp lives on.