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I find languages like MUMPS unreadable, but I also know a few folks that love it and truly confused why I don't. I programmed a lot of production code with Perl, and that confuses the heck out of a lot of programmers. I loved Postscript and Forth, but I keep running into people that think they are complicated and hard to follow when the rules are so simple. People are hateful of selector-syntax in Smalltalk and Objective-C, but I think its the most easily understandable syntax out there because the what the variables are for is right there instead of just a comma separated list of variables with no hints. I truly wonder if the C family of languages gets so ingrained that anything else is just seen as crappy?

Lisp benefits greatly from a decent text editor, but it is quite readable.




Indeed, I have a friend who totally loved Mumps. I have almost 40 years with Common Lisp, love the language, but I have always been fairly open to what customers want. I know people who do amazing things with Python or Java.

I don’t much care about other peoples’ preferences for politics, programming language selection, or religion (or lack thereof).

It seems best for a team to choose a stack by some form consensus, and stick with it.

I have read the linked article several times in the 5 years since it was written, and I enjoy the shared experience. But the article could also have been about using Clojure, or Ruby, etc., etc. And also been interesting.


So, emacs?

We are talking lisp here. I don't think there's anything that compares.




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