TITLE: A Guilty Pleasure, Language-Style AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: April 09, 2006 10:31 AM DESC: ----- BODY: While doing a little reading to end what has been a long week at the office, I ran across a pointer to Steve Yegge's old piece, Tour de Babel, which has recently been touched up. This is the third time now that Yegge's writing has come recommended to me, and I've enjoyed the recommended article each time. That means I need to add his blog to my newsreader. This was my favorite quote from the article, a perfect thought with which to end the week:
Familiarity breeds contempt in most cases, but not with computer languages. You have to become an expert with a better language before you can start to have contempt for the one you are most familiar with. So if you don't like what I am saying about C++, go become an expert at a better language (I recommend Lisp), and then you'll be armed to disagree with me. You won't, though. I'll have tricked you. You won't like C++ anymore...
I know that this is the sort of inflammatory, holier-than-thou pronouncement that smug Lisp weenies make all the time, and that it doesn't do anything to move a language discussion forward. But from all I've read by Steve, he isn't a language bigot at all but someone who seems to like lots of languages for different virtues. He even speaks kindly of C++ and Java when they are discussed in certain contexts. Even though I know I shouldn't like these sorts of statements, or give them the bully pulpit of my ever-so-popular blog, I give in to the urge. They make me smile. I myself am not a smug Lisp weenie. However, if you replaced "Lisp" with "Smalltalk" or "Scheme" in the quoted paragraph, I would be smiling even wider. (And if you don't know why replacing "Lisp" with "Scheme" in that sentence would be a huge deal to a large number of Lisp devotees, well, then you just don't understand anything at all about smug Lisp weenies!) Pardon me this guilty pleasure. -----