Lispers and academiaLisp is a dead language. It's only used by hobbyists and has no recent noteworthy software written in it other than emacs and hackerjews.
Ctards are treated like a protected species – defended at all costs by the LispersWhere?
Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.
It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried writing programs in it. But this is something all programmers have to do. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time. I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada, Visual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS, Novell Netware, and CORBA, among others. They just smelled wrong.
It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model. These two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands between them. As computers have grown more powerful, the new languages being developed have been moving steadily toward the Lisp model. A popular recipe for new programming languages in the past 20 years has been to take the C model of computing and add to it, piecemeal, parts taken from the Lisp model, like runtime typing and garbage collection.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.
My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects. As a result, I have not had time or occasion to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby.
ITS itself was written in assembler, but many ITS projects were written in the AI language LISP. LISP was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. LISP freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.
Another hacker named Dennis Ritchie invented a new language called "C" for use under Thompson's embryonic Unix. Like Unix, C was designed to be pleasant, unconstraining, and flexible. Interest in these tools spread at Bell Labs, and they got a boost in 1971 when Thompson and Ritchie won a bid to produce what we'd now call an office-automation system for internal use there. But Thompson and Ritchie had their eye on a bigger prize.
And there was yet a third current flowing. The first personal computer had been marketed in 1975. Apple was founded in 1977, and advances came with almost unbelievable rapidity in the years that followed. The potential of microcomputers was clear, and attracted yet another generation of bright young hackers. Their language was BASIC, so primitive that PDP-10 partisans and Unix aficionados both considered it beneath contempt.
C - Freedom to do whatever you want with the machineRitchie did not invent this idea and it's not the only language with this idea (neither is Forth). It was taken from BCPL and threaded code was also used by BCPL before there was a Forth. C did not introduce anything new besides the syntax.
Lisp - Freedom to write arbitrary abstractionsThis is the belief of mental midgets like Paul Graham. There are many abstractions you can't do in Lisp, but Paul Graham doesn't care about them because he filters everything through Lisp.
Asm - Same as C but without the user-friendly abstractionsAssembly is not the same as C at all. You filter everything through C because you don't know any better.
Other languages - Designed by rule-cucks and bureaucratsAccording to the Paul Graham followers, C is simultaneously the best language other than Lisp, and the problem with everything in programming today. How is this possible?