Dialects of Lisp

Re:Dialects of Lisp by derleth on Friday February 22, 2013 @02:10PM (#5266030)

Why don't people do things like this for Dialects of Algol? Is it because most of them got new names, like Java, C, and so on?

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Re:Dialects of Lisp by groovy2shoes on Friday February 22, 2013 @03:39PM (#5266627)

I was actually thinking about this same question earlier. There are dialects of Lisp and dialects of BASIC, but most other languages are not considered dialects of anything similar. How different do two programming languages have to be before they're no longer considered dialects?

It seems like Scheme and Common Lisp, for instance, have more differences than Java and C# have from each other. Why wouldn't C# be considered a Java dialect? Visual Basic is very different from BASICA, yet they are both considered BASIC dialects. Why shouldn't Pascal and Ada be considered ALGOL dialects?

The line-drawing process seems completely arbitrary.

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Re:Dialects of Lisp by jfb on Friday February 22, 2013 @06:34PM (#5267644)

"The line-drawing process seems completely arbitrary."

The real world cannot be exhaustively described with a single taxonomy.

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Re:Dialects of Lisp by det23x on Friday February 22, 2013 @05:57PM (#5267481)

Because natural language's type hierarchy is not that sound as we programmers would like it to be.

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