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Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily? by omouse on Thursday September 06, 2007 @11:50PM (#51482)
and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything."

Wrong. This reddit comment nailed it: http://programming.reddit.com/info/2mm0n/comments/c2mo30

Erik's argument is that Perl incentivizes The Wrong Way, and disincentivizes The Right Way. It's not about coercion, it's about incentives. "it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done." --jemfinch

Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily? by SwellJoe on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:06AM (#51499)
"Wrong."

Very concise. And it's always good to back it up with the assertions of some random dude on Reddit.

Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily? by omouse on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:41AM (#51508)
The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum. I said "wrong" because you somehow missed that part of his post. He was not saying that Perl is wrong because it has some of Lisp's features. He was saying that it is wrong because it allows shitty work. In fact, it encourages it by making it harder to write good solutions.

Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions).

Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily? by SwellJoe on Friday September 07, 2007 @01:23AM (#51527)
"The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum."

An ill-informed rant from a crank is not the same as "backed up".

"Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions)."

We all have our preferences.

While you can quote your favorite usenet crank from years ago, I can quote one of my favorites about Lisp (doesn't mean Lisp isn't a great language for many tasks...this quote just makes me laugh every time I read it):

"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." --Larry Wall ([email protected])

Smart people can disagree on many things. Programming languages are no different.

Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily? by philh on Friday September 07, 2007 @08:48AM (#51645)
>An ill-informed rant from a crank is not the same as "backed up".

Omouse isn't (directly) asserting anything about perl. He's making assertions about Naggum's assertions. For that purpose, the ill-informed rant in question is an excellent source of corroboration.