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A comment on 45 years since its creation. The C language still very popular. Parent comment

Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @01:52PM (#11763841)
It could. That might normally be considered cheating but LISP is actually designed with philosophy of customizing language itself to problem domain. Thing is, the implementations and even language features of modern LISP's are nothing like McCarthy's simplistic language and interpreter. They couldn't succeed being that due to performance and usability issues.

So, I think it's more fair to talk about LISP languages as an ongoing family but still a cheat to treat a modern one as original LISP. Probably should date it from creation of dialect or similar one.

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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by ColinDabritz on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @01:56PM (#11763903)
Certainly, but the borders aren't so obvious to me. Is any language going to last 100 years without changing so much it feels 'nothing like' it's origin point?

Even if it hasn't changed in name, it may have changed in spirit. Some languages that promote themselves under very different names are substantially more similar than other cases where new language versions are dramatically different.

What 'essence' makes it the 'same language'? An interesting problem.

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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:04PM (#11764012)
COBOL or Pascal if you don't use modern features lol. Idk. It's an interesting question about how we count the changes against the language's lineage. I don't have an answer to that one. We need a debate about it on StackOverflow that moderators close as "not constructive." Those are the threads that usually have great insights into issues like this haha.
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