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From: Barry Margolin <bar...@genuity.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia
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Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 16:08:43 GMT

In article <9rmiep$gm...@news3.cadvision.com>,
Wade Humeniuk <humen...@cadvision.com> wrote:
>>
>> One small question:  why drop the word "powerful"?  They gave lisp so
>little
>> credit, we should not give away the one positive comment.  Besides, the
>more
>> verbatim text that is kept, the easier it will be for them to accept.
>>
>
>I removed powerful because it was a subjective term.  It is like "slow" and
>"memory hog".  It is my personal preference that adjectives like that are
>not included.  I do not think computer languages should be classified as
>powerful.  Effective, yes, expressive, yes.  Maybe a better word could be
>found?

I agree.  Are there any computer languages that merit an encyclopedia entry
that *aren't* powerful?  Java and C++ may be crappy, but it's in our same
power ballpark.  Even modern versions of BASIC and Fortran are pretty
powerful.  The lowest-power languages I can think of off the top of my head
are Bourne shell scripting, AWK, and RPG-2 (is it still used much?), and I
suspect these are all obscure enough (as far as the general public is
concerned) that there's no encyclopedia entry for them.  (Yes, I know
people have written simple programs using editor macros, but I think it's
stretching things to call "sed" a programming language.)

-- 
Barry Margolin, bar...@genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
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