For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality, go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open Genera 2.0, the whole OS, which was available of dynamic modification and extension by the programmer, which could be found in a torrent search, and then go to the rosettacode website and look at every single page too see what a fucking crap is the language you are using to get shit done in exchange for a paycheck. It is worst in any possible way - verbosity, clumsiness, clutter, cryptic syntax, you name it.
This is actually not interesting notion. Everyone with a bit of brains could visit rosettacode. The interesting questions are why it is so that the world is dominated by Java.
Pages and pages were written about what's wrong with Java and why it is so popular. One sentence summary could go like this "a sandbox for crowds of packers to get shit done, agressively marketed to them via "you don't have to understand" memes by corporations to make big money". It spread like a virus due to bandwagon and peer effects and catchy memes like "write once" or "millions of man hours".
Ok, use it, enjoy yourself, but, please, do not touch so rare and really wonderful things which you unable to comprehend.
The "layers of DSLs" metaphor mimics as close as possible the way our mind uses a language, which we call "verbal", or "logical" mind, as opposed to "non-verbal, ancient, emotional" mind, which is based on evolved reflexes, captured by genes (Sorry!).
We are using symbols to refer to inner representations (concepts) we have in our minds. so "everything is a symbol" (just a reference to a "storage") is a "good idea".
When we're talking about some specific context (situation, or "domain") we tend to use some reduced, appropriate set of words (symbols) related to it, along with usual "glue". This what we call Domain Specific Language, or a Slang, if you wish. This is also a "good idea", groups has slangs.
Layered structure is, in some sense, what the Nature is. Atoms, molecules, proteins, tissues,, organs, systems, brain, body, you see. So, layers of data is a good idea, but layers of DSLs is even better one. It not only mimics how the world is, but how we should structure our programs.
Neither the language nor its layers are set in stone, they could be transformed, extended, adapted using the very same mechanism which underlies it.
Iterative looping constructs, for example, were build out of macros, and the Loop DSL is the most striking example of how a language could be expended with itself as a Meta-language.
Some "good people", like R. Gabriel, have argued that we need more complex control constructs (special forms) as long as we are trying to write complex programs (language should be adequate to the domain), so, the ability do define new special forms as we go, without breaking everything, is a "good idea".
This is, btw, the idea behind the recursive bottom-up process of software development, popularized by SICP and championed by pg and rtm. Language should evolve together with our understanding of the problem domain.
Structures is also a DSL. This gives us the way to structure our data (everything is an expression in a Lisp, everything could be evaluated, this is another very "good idea") to mimic or represent more conveniently the objects of real world. Structures could be nested, getters and setters were created automatically, but could be redefined, etc.
So, by extending the language with new, appropriate constructs (by defining new special forms) we could improve our way of modeling the reality and create better "inner representations" for the concepts we made (captured)? Seems like a "good idea".
But wait, because everything is an expression (a Lisp form) which could be evaluated, why not just put code blocks (expressions) into the same structures? Thus we have "data structures" which captures not just characteristics (state) but also behavior of real world "objects".
To capture the behavior we need the notion of "protocols", which is just a named set of generic functions. So we have defprotocol which, essentially, creates a structure and binds names (symbols) to procedures (expressions) which consists of Lisp forms. Thus we got MOP implemented, which is the basis of CLOS.
I forgot to mention, that since everything is a symbol (reference) we could combine "objects" into lists and other aggregates, map them, reduce them - the whole set of layers of language "below" are available.
This doesn't mean that this is the only way to program, this is just one of the possible programming paradigms. What is really matter is that we could, by using the very same means of combination and abstraction "import" any other paradigm we wish.
And everything so uniform and concise that it could be easily traced back to "conses".
btw, this is not a "strict", "rigid", "set in stone" language (it is a nonsense to try to "fix" a language, it contradicts with the its nature). We have reasonable, "evolved" defaults, such as Lexical scoping for variables, but we could have Dynamic scoped ones if we wish. Thus, it is possible to extend the language with "non-local exit" control structures, which is your fucking Exceptions.
Immutablity has also reasonable defaults. List and mapping functions are always producing a new copy of a list, leaving original ones unaltered, while their "destructive" equivalents were segregated by following an explicit calling convention (Scheme is famous for this).
Evaluation strategies could also be explicitly selected, so lazy lists or streams could be defined using the very same conses and macros and list notation.
Being a small language (after all the transformations - macro-expansions, rewriting rules, inlining has been done) it could be efficiently compiled (using a compiler written in itself) diretly into Machine code, which runs on more plathorms than fucking JVM.
This is what some people are considered as a work of a fine art, and called "programmable programming language".
But this is only a half of the story. There were machines (a hardware FSM if you wish) which was able to run the Lisp code efficiently. But this is another story.
But hey, you can hire cheap labour and they will be prevented from messing up too much, so corporations like it.
Which is a quality of a fundamentally broken organizational system
No, it's a quality of a robust organizational system. Let's take a program that parses html as an example. What would you think of an html parser that only works well with high quality, strictly structured html and breaks under poorly formatted html? You would call it a fragile, broken system. But a parser that deals equally well with low quality html would be a well thought out, robust system. And here's the key to the point I was making: the robust system could be relied upon to do its job consistently even under less than ideal conditions.
A system that requires exceptional engineers to maintain it is a huge source of risk for any company. If your current exceptional engineer leaves for whatever reason, you have to find another one. If the reason your engineer left is your company is suddenly facing insolvency thanks to a nasty patent dispute, all you may be able to afford to hire is a college grad to maintain what you've already got.
The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere. If it's not vested in a small number of people able to actually understand the system, then the intelligence ends up being an emergent property of the human automatons, Chinese-room style, with the now-important "manager" pretending to control it when in fact nobody does.
The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere.
Yes it does. Nothing I've said suggests otherwise. But, let's say you can lower the amount of intelligence required to actually understand the system. Not much, just from "exceptional" (by which I mean 10x or the top 1% of programmers working in the field) to "average" (by which I mean the median level of intelligence for programmers working in the field). If you can do that, you lower your risk over the long term. If someone leaves, you can easily hire a replacement and get them up to speed.
Every system has accidental complexity, so a better language can obviously help achieve this. However, Java does not do this. What Java does is lower the intelligence required to make changes without understanding the system, by having few abstractions and effectively making the programmer work in an intermediate language with added redundancy.
And while this approach allows for cheaper unskilled programmers to be used, they take up more time figuring out what to attempt to change and then crossing their fingers hoping the code will compile. A similar amount could have been spent for an intelligent consultant working in a high level language and serving several such clients, but management would rather feel secure by having someone they control.
> I'm explaining why a healthy corporation
Once it's in the territory of hiring more people instead of better people, you have something that prioritizes control over obtaining results, which is not healthy. Unfortunately, it can indeed still pass for a healthy corporation and live many decades, a source of many modern ills.
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
(and for the record, I don't really like java either)
Lisp Machines I only know through videos and old papers. But I do have experience with Smalltalk during my CS degree, before Java was a thing.
Smalltalk is by no means Lisp, but shares a few ideas.
If those systems had become mainstream, computing would probably be like Bret Victor discusses on his "Future of Programming" talk.
Instead we have developers still using systems as if UNIX had been released last year.
Lisp has its virtues, but the Lisp evangelists/cheerleaders/fanboys would be more effective at converting the rest of us if they quit assuming that anyone who disagreed with them was too stupid to see the obvious virtues of their wonderful language.
And don't say that you don't care whether others like your language. You care whether others like it enough for businesses like Symbolics to survive, so that you don't have to visit bitsavers to see this stuff that you love so much.
Sounds like a nightmare, writing code for an OS where every chucklehead with a keyboard has modified it just because they can.
Rather sounds like the curse of the gifted[1] writ large. Sure it was cooler and had neat features but couldn't reliably deliver over the long term.
Sadly, sadly, that's not enough. Oftentimes, that doesn't even matter.
It's also true that the more people use a tool (and for longer time), the more ways it will be found to suck (and Lisp has been around for quite a while (and used by quite a few people too (probably used by less people than Java) and (indeed) it managed to spawn quite a few heated reactions (to it's salient characteristics)))
Sure it became a horrible bloated mess - but isn't that the doom that faces all succesful software eventually?
- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author
Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".