The LISP defender

This is me. A CS major about to graduate. (´・ω・｀)

I go to the worst possible school in america. MIT.

The kids here are just brogrammers and webdevs, and dumb idiot girls who dress like sluts have neon colored hair and can't even code, and are all really mean bullies.

The thing is I always have my Dijkstra book with me everyday in all of my classes. I have decent grades and I love reading papers from the greats like Knuth, Dijsktra, McCarthy, Sussman, Steele, The list just goes on and on.

The kids at my school mostly read horribble blogs like Ragenwald (2.0) beta, Coding Horror, r/programming, all of thaht. My favorite blogs the top 3 are: lambda the ultimate, olegs kiselyovs homepage, and the codeless code.

One day this idiotic and slutty girls comes up to me and asks what I'm reading.

"OMG!!! Like what are you reading to!!!LOL"

"Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60" I say.

"OMG!!1!! You read OLDDD Stuff. THATS OUTDATED AND FAGGY LIKE FORTRAN! NODE.JS AND ARE BETTER!!!"

"like fortran??"

"OMG LIKE EVERYBODY!!! HE READS SPECIFICATIONS FROM THE 60s!!!! WAT A FAG"

Everyone procede to look at me.

"AHAHAHA!! GET OUT OF HERE AND TAKE YOUR STUPID MANUAL"

I turn to walk away and try not to cry...

and then it wells up inside me.. I turn around I just fucking say it:

"Look here you dumb slut. Don't you ever say that ALGOL 60 is for fags or outdated. ALGOL is legendary. They created BNF what everyone uses to specify syntax. The entire compiler was bootstrapped by hand compiling the implementation after the wrote it. node.js is for fags. ALGOL influenced scheme and so many other structured languages it's a legend. So just remember this: ITS NOT FOR FAGS!! GOT IT!!!!"

I then proceede to walk out singing my favorite song "The eternal flame/God wrote in lisp code - julia ecklar" out loud.

The girl starts to cry.

I am now know as "The LISP defender" cause of that day. Know everyone learns to never fuck with me and my programming texts. And to this day I am glad I stood up to this girl. Keep structured programming alive, don't let it die out.

Scheme is not a Lisp IMO because of two types of reasons: first,
technical, which have been argued on this group ad nauseam (the
deepest difference there to me is that a scheme program is defined as
a string of characters whereas a CL program is defined as a sequence
of lists of Lisp objects. This may seem pedantic or trivial but a lot
of different design decisions follow from this. It makes Scheme an
infix member of the Algol language family.); but more important,
philosophically. The Scheme community has evolved a set of values at
odds with the spirit of Lisp: the goal for simplicity at the expense
of convenience (compare the concept of CL's $item designators with the
design of convert stuff explicitly like Scheme's exact->inexact), the
goal of only giving basic blocks and letting you assemble stuff
yourself (call/cc isn't a replacement for a worked out exception
system).

To sum it up with a Ritchie quote: "Some languages were meant to get
work done, some were meant to prove a point." I put Lisp in the first
category and Scheme and ML in the second. (See also the reliance on
tail call elimination to be able to prove the point that a looping
construct isn't necessary.)