Re:The Origin of CAR and CDR in Lisp (2005)
by kazinator on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @03:14AM
(#16013566)
Nothing that was based on garbage collection picked up a lot of users before 1999 or so.
Basically when the world "rebooted" into garbage collected, managed languages, it was amid a sort of Lisp amnesia. A lot of that was due to new people who had no such memory to recall.
Prior to this general movement, there were severe barriers in place against anything memory-managed.
And anyway, even if everyone who had already been programming in 1980 switched to Lisp today, it would be a drop in the bucket.
I think the original Lisp people didn't persevere enough. They peaked early. By the time Java and whatnot came around, the presence wasn't there.
Basically when the world "rebooted" into garbage collected, managed languages, it was amid a sort of Lisp amnesia. A lot of that was due to new people who had no such memory to recall.
Prior to this general movement, there were severe barriers in place against anything memory-managed.
And anyway, even if everyone who had already been programming in 1980 switched to Lisp today, it would be a drop in the bucket.
I think the original Lisp people didn't persevere enough. They peaked early. By the time Java and whatnot came around, the presence wasn't there.