A friend of mine pointed me at this essay, The Hunded Year Language, which I read and then subsequently was compelled to spit on. Here is why I spit on it:

I think my main gripe is that the author sounds like every other white tower language weenie I've ever had the displeasure of debating when i was at school. (Did you like my aliteration?) They all seem to be obsessed with the "cleanliness" of a language, which they usually define as being conceptually simple. Paul's specific peeve appears to be that he wants the language to have as little sugar in it as possible, i.e. it shouldn't be possible to express one language feature in terms of another. (This implies redundancy, and redundancy isn't clean.)

The problem, though, is that language weenies get very excited about what properties a language has (like "cleanliness"), but don't seem to talk much about the experience of using the language, or who would use it, or what it would be used for, or how efficiently it lets you do something. I think of them as a bunch of old men in suits with top-hats and monacles, exclaiming about the pleasing curves and fine polish of a hammer. Some of them have even picked up the hammer. But none of them have actually ever built a house with it. Because if they had, they'd know that a hammer is fucking useless, and you need a goddamned nail gun if you want to finish within 100 years. The nail gun is expensive, it's ugly, it jams, it stinks, and it's loud. But it's the only practical way to build a house these days.

Another irritating property of the Monacle Set is that they always have a pet hammer. Whatever the argument's about, regardless of the issue at hand, they're only ever getting at one thing: their pet hammer is the best tool for solving your problem. For this Paul person it's clearly LISP; everything in the essay is so transparently slanted toward LISP... starting with the unexplained and (I think) fundamentally flawed assumption that a language with few keywords is the wave of the future. Who the fuck cares about keyword count? Every human on the planet is fluent in at least one language consisting of thousands of words. If that's what it takes to make the language more useful for solving problems, they can learn a couple of extra keywords! Geez.

And LISP, of all things! I could find you 50 people at CMU who would point out all of the things that are stupid about LISP (mostly because it's typeless, something I personally find offensive). But then again, even if they start out talking about what's bad about LISP, they're always going to finish up by talking about what's good about ML, because ML is their pet hammer.

Ungh, I've become so angry at academia. Can someone suggest a major for me? I'd happily go back to graduate school if I felt it would serve a purpose.