[ajross]

> I think that you’re right, and I think it’s great, because we have a programming model in which code is data and data is code: Lisp & S-expressions.

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp."

http://wiki.c2.com/?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming

Seriously, this has happened again and again and again. You have software, so you configure it via a clean and simple text syntax, then the configuration needs to be generated and the syntax becomes more complicated, then the next system you do has an "API" instead so you can configure it via programming, which is too complicated so the next time you Do it Right and go with a simple text file, which is then outgrown when the configuration it stores becomes too complicated...

It's like a circle of life thing.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

And people are vehemently agreeing/disagreeing depending on their phase shift in the Turing complete vs declarative carousel.

Compare with: strongly vs weakly typed languages

[marcosdumay]

That saying was very true of Fortran, reasonably true of C, and mostly don't happen on newer languages.

[mschaef]

I think the parts of Lisp that tended to be rebuilt have mostly been incorporated into the newer languages. (At least, it's been a very long time since I've had to rewrite a fundamental data structure, etc.)