Editing 297: Lisp Cycles

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In the second panel, Cueball proposes that new programmers might continue to learn Lisp forever; despite the language's lack of widespread adoption, a small cadre of hackers will always exist who keep the language alive.
 
In the second panel, Cueball proposes that new programmers might continue to learn Lisp forever; despite the language's lack of widespread adoption, a small cadre of hackers will always exist who keep the language alive.
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First, a little background:
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Lisp was once the lingua franca of the frontier of computer science research at places like {{w|MIT_AI_Lab|MIT's Project MAC}} and {{w|Stanford_University_centers_and institutes#Stanford_Artificial_Intelligence_Laboratory|SAIL}}, and is still highly relevant in academic and theoretical computer science, despite the subsequent emergence of many other {{w|functional programming language|highly functional research languages}}. That many of these venerable research institutions have vanished or declined, their faculties having split up or moved into the private sector, and the advanced and demanding course-work taught there using Lisp having been replaced by courses based around teaching languages-of-the-day (such as Java, Python, Ruby, and even JavaScript for web design) in a series of so-called {{w|AI Winter}}s is a widely remarked upon feature of history. To many, this conjures a nostalgic impression of the halcyon days of advanced computer research when funding for blue-sky exploratory coding was plentiful, and most of the features of the contemporary digital world were first thought up and made real by wizardly hackers (the well-known purple cover of one venerated Lisp textbook is especially evocative, featuring a renaissance woodcut illustration of a sorcerous natural philosopher conjuring up magic with Lisp symbols superimposed into the image).
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Throughout all this, Lisp, one of the first and greatest successes of theoretical computer science, has persisted, still in general though no-longer-universal use within the warrens of programming language and computability research, still studied by handfuls of students interested in something more than simply getting a job as a code grinder for Big Data, its features still inspiring generations of new language designers and implementers to ''do better'' ({{w|Ruby (programming language)|Ruby}} was designed β€” according to his admission β€” by Matsumoto Yukihiro as "a bad rip-off of Lisp" that would be "nicer to ordinary people;" {{w|Java (programming language)|Java 8}} introduced lambdas β€” ''in 2014!''). David Thornley even noted that whether or not Lisp was a "dead" or moribund programming language is, in fact, a question older than almost all programming languages, and has been for decades.
  
 
The third panel references ''{{w|Star Wars (film)|Star Wars}}.'' The "old wizard" Obi-Wan Kenobi, who remembers the culture and sophistication of the Old Republic ("Before the dark times. Before the Empire.") and lives as a hermit in the desert at the beginning of the film spoke these lines when passing on a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker:
 
The third panel references ''{{w|Star Wars (film)|Star Wars}}.'' The "old wizard" Obi-Wan Kenobi, who remembers the culture and sophistication of the Old Republic ("Before the dark times. Before the Empire.") and lives as a hermit in the desert at the beginning of the film spoke these lines when passing on a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker:

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