Language criticism

[davidson@sdcsvax.UUCP (Greg Davidson)]

<flame on>

I am getting very tired of opinionated articles from people who don't
have expertise and experience backing them up.  I have just read a
string of articles telling us all why we shouldn't use LISP from people
who have only a faint acquaintance with the language.  A similar
situation is going on in net.lang.c about Modula vs. C.  In both cases,
the people who are devout adherents of language X think that they have
the goods on language Y.  I have noticed that expert responses are less
and less frequent and assume that the experts are fed up and are
unsubscribing from these newsgroups.  This is impoverishing us all.

The opinions I had about LISP before I had had major experience with
the language are laughable.  With my exposure to only mainstream languages
(FORTRAN, ALGOL, Pascal, etc.) I was unable to understand why anyone
should use LISP.  After going through a complete turnaround with LISP
(and a milder version of the same thing with PROLOG), I will now spare
the community the burden of my uninformed opinions.  I ask the same of
the rest of you.

I have read almost no informed criticism of LISP in any of these
groups, so if you're thinking ``at least MY opinions are justified'',
then you are almost certainly one of the offenders.  I will follow up
this article with a later one revealing some of the common
misconceptions about LISP, but for now I don't want to dilute my
point.  Before I unsubscribe from the newsgroups that claim to be
forums for some of my favorite topics, I intend to kick up a fuss.

<flame off>

_Greg