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by SeanLuke 2171 days ago
That's not the point. He said it wasn't possible to improve on the committee. But of course it is.

But while we're on the subject: both C and UNIX are actively being updated and improved even now. The Common Lisp standard hasn't changed in any significant way since the 1980s. In Lisp everyone is just adopting ad hoc standards, agreeing under the table that everyone should use a certain networking package, threading mechanism, or Unicode standard for Lisp characters. That's the worst of many possible ways to deal with the problem.
2 comments
lispm 2171 days ago
One can claim that C is best improved by replacing it with a new languages. See Rust, D, and others. Lisp, too. -> Clojure, Julia, Racket, ...

The 'step 1' 'take Common Lisp' is already hopeless, because there are few people interested in that for various reasons.

I don't think it's 'trivial' to fix a fading large niche language like Common Lisp, which was designed at a different time, with had much more design power back then. It's actually far from trivial.

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pjmlp 2171 days ago
> But while we're on the subject: both C and UNIX are actively being updated and improved even now

Given the contents of ISO C17 and POSIX at Open Group it doesn't look like it.

Unless we have different understandings of improvement.

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kazinator 2171 days ago
What the ISO C people are doing can be called vandalism.
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