georgegeorges

not only was RadioShack the only computer store in town, but they also helped open up the IBM platform by selling the Tandy computer (produced by their parent company, Tandy). Prior to that they created and sold the TRS-80.

It's easy to toss rocks at them today. But it's hard to understate their importance to the early PC industry.

Ultimately Jobs was right. This sort of hobbyist market wasn't going to last (and RadioShack has completely missed the boat on the 3d printing and "maker" movements). We don't have smartphones with BASIC installed. Computer makers don't even care about that aspect of their devices (that is, that they are programmable). Things have changed quite dramatically.

always use the right tool for the job

Standard grep is much faster on multi-gigabyte files than anything you can figure out how to do in your pet language. By the time you get close to matching grep, you would have reimplemented most of grep, in half-assed fashion at that.

Your delusion is assuming standard command line tools are simple in function because they have a simple interface that Average Joe can use.

If you're going to rant, you might want to actually have a clear point to make.

college kids on comp.lang.lisp asking for the answers for problem-set 3 on last night's homework

Surely not during the Naggum days. CLL was a hostile wasteland.

That is the lesson of perl and python and all these other languages. They're not good for anything. They suck. And they suck in libraries and syntax and semantics and weirdness-factor and everything.

What? How have you not heard of CPAN? There is not a single language in the world that can touch Perl's libraries. I'm not sure why you feel the need to toss either Perl or Python under the bus to make some petty point about Dylan's lack of popularity. Python replaced Scheme at MIT. It's time to move on. I know I have.

You have to have your head pretty far up your own ass to not see how much Common Lisp sucks. It's a language designed by committee, and it looks like it.

I've used Erlang too. For everything Erlang does well, there are countless areas that make you want to bang your head against the desk.

Languages don't matter. Platforms matter. APIs matter. Playing nicely with the rest of the world fucking matters. Common Lisp wouldn't.

it requires a cable that restricts freedom of movement.

I don't see how this matters at all. If a cable doesn't restrict movement, surely a table, chair, wall, mountain, lake, ocean, cliff will restrict your movement. You can't emulate infinite environments when stuck in the physical world.

but the Racket language, while near Scheme, is not.

You've described 99% of Scheme systems. The only exception I know of is Scheme48, which is pretty much the Third Reich of Scheme systems.

Portability between Scheme systems is tedious and, in some cases, close to impossible. Even moreso when you start using some combination of SRFIs.