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The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. Charles Darwin Lisp is the language of loveliness.

We might be tempted to call them liars, but even though all the details are in essence not representative of a particular reality, what is contained in their work is essentially true—there may not be a Nick Adams and neither a Big Two-Hearted River in Seney, but Heminway captured something about real life that makes his story not a lie. James Gosling in talking about Java acknowledges that at least the object-oriented notion of late or dynamic binding is important to support shipping new (though constrained) versions of libraries and to make derived classes, but he seems to forget that the malleability of the medium while programming is part of the act of discovery that goes into understanding all the requirements and forces—internal or not—that a system must be designed around. Discouraged by having no computing career and lamenting static thinking, I was originally heartened by the rising importance of XML—which amounts to some fundamental Lisp data structures reinterpreted by people with bad taste brainwashed by inflexibility.

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