[Openmcl-devel] RIP Larry Tesler

[mikel evins]

> On Feb 20, 2020, at 2:18 PM, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 19, 2020, at 8:04 PM, mikel evins <mevins at me.com> wrote:
>> 
>> In a world without Ralph, Common Lisp remains my favorite programming language that I can still get my hands on.
> 
> Mikel
> I came to CCL by way of Dylan (I was one of the alpha test sites). I’m curious to know your assessment of Swift (and that of other correspondents to this list).

I've built some things in Swift, and I like it okay. It doesn't stand out as special to me. Maybe it's better than Objective-C. Maybe. On one axis or another.

I don't like it as much as, say, Julia or Clojure or ML. I like Scheme better than any of those languages. Well…ask me on some other day and I might like ML or Haskell as much as Scheme, or close to it. Depending on the version of Scheme. 

I like Common Lisp still better than any of these.

Once upon a time I liked Dylan better than Common Lisp. That was back in the days when Dylan was called "Ralph" and was very definitely a Lisp, implemented as an extended version of Macintosh Common Lisp with a Dylan compiler and Listener built into it.

If I'm working on a program, and I'm using some other language, then I'm constantly missing Common Lisp. If I'm working in Scheme, I'm missing Common Lisp. Working in Clojure? Missing Common Lisp. Julia? ML? Swift? Missing Common Lisp.

For a couple of years in the early 1990s I worked every day in Dylan. For that little span of time, I didn't miss Common Lisp.