homogenia [Lisp and Smalltalk are dead: It’s C all the way down]
Thiago Silva
remove Smalltalk from the required curriculum in favor of C++. "
"Lisp and Smalltalk are dead: It’s C all the way down."
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/lisp-and-smalltalk-are-dead-its-c-all-the-way-down/
"I don’t dispute that Unix/C philosophy has won the marketplace. I
worry about only teaching that to our students. I think it’s important
for Computing majors to understand [Richard] Gabriel’s debate, to
understand what’s valuable about Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, and other
high-power, lots-done-in-few-lines-of-code, flexible languages and
environments. We want our students to be thought leaders, to think
about possibilities that aren’t currently in vogue in the marketplace.
They should know about lessons of history, to avoid repeating mistakes
and to resurrect old ideas when technology and opportunities fit."
"Few departments teach surveys of programming languages anymore, and I
don’t know of any department that teaches a required course in history
of computing. I worry about what this means for our discipline. Are
we really going to tell students that the peak of human expressibility
for computation was in 1973? That all programming language research
from here on out is wasted energy? That simplicity is all that we can
ever hope for, and correctness and consistency just aren’t worth
working on? Are we forever stuck with 30+ year old ideas and don’t
even teach that anything else is possible?"
--
Thiago Silva
Computer Science
M.Sc. Candidate at Federal University of Pernambuco
jabber/gtalk: tsi...@jabber-br.org
http://blog.sourcecraft.info