SONG: Common Lisper
Martin DeMello
(lyrics and mp3 at http://www.paradise-engineering.com/quotation/commonpeople.html
)
Common Lisper
She'd studied scheme, she was a first-year student
She wasn't certain, but she thought it prudent
To explore something more
She said "Are you a real-world coder?"
And so I fired emacs up and showed her what I'd done
And I had only just begun when she said
I want to be a common lisper
I want to write however common lispers write
I want to code like a common lisper
I want to code like a common lisper tonight
Well, what else could I do? I said I'd sit and step her through
I showed her round the macro system
I wasn't sure if she saw the wisdom of that
But I had it pat
I said "look, we can capture symbols"
She said, "but hygiene would have made it simple not to care"
I said "yeah? well, we seem to do fine without it"
Are you sure you want to be a common lisper?
You want to hack however common lispers hack?
You want to think like a common lisper
You want to have your tail calls stay on the stack?
But she didn't seem concerned
She just smiled and said she'd learn
Live in emacs all the time
Run and debug code in slime
Read and post to comp lang lisp
Flame some newbies to a crisp
Look down smugly on the drones
With their endless Algol clones
Watch them reinvent the wheel
Rest assured their language is no big deal, yeah
You'll never be a common lisper
You'll never follow where the common lispers led
You'll never feel like a common lisper
You'll never have to hear your language is dead
And use C++ instead
Just to earn your daily bread
Stick around with the common lispers
Stick around and you might learn something new
Learn to hack with the common lispers
Learn to hack on your own and carry it through
Although no one cares what you do
Because they want the pill that's blue
[copyright Martin DeMello, Aug 2007]