Hi adrianh. Stands to reason that about the only reply that actually analysed what i said was yours. *grin* Yes, I sometimes have a chip about "academia". Yes I went off on a rant that I probably shouldnt have. Do I still think that I had a point? Yes.

I have to admit I don't see the same hacker/academic confrontation you see in the article.

Well I admit I probably read more into it the first time than there was there. Hence the update. Hence the replies.

I know of very large and serious companies with large amounts of mission critical code written in Prolog, LISP and APL. Actually, I've never considered APL to be an academic language - I've only ever come across it being used by stats fiends in industry.

Well, I'll admit that I know of a number of specialist fields where these languages are commonplace. Are they used worth mentioning outside of these spheres? I would argue that no they arent. Because generally speaking they aren't particularly suitable to general purpose work. I think that if they were we would see them more often. (I recognize this is dangerously close to a very bad argument, but in this case I dont think I'm crossing the line.)

Prolog is a language I regularly miss, since it's quite hard to write code in a declarative/logicial style in Perl.

I think a lot of people find it hard to write code in a declarative/logical style. I think a lot of people have a hard time even understanding the ideas behind it. Its unsuprising to me that we dont see a lot of code written that way. Its confusing. Hell most people have a hard enough time understanding perfectly straightforward imperative programming, let alone the wacky stuff.

Judging the worth of a language by its commercial success isn't that useful. Perl, after all, doesn't come out very well on that scale. Neither does Python, Ruby, TCL, etc. COBOL and VB, on the other hand, must be great!

I'm not sure that I expressed myself clearly. I certainly didn't mean to imply commerical success in terms of financial benefit. I meant more in breadth of use, in the number of running applications/systems (pick a metric) that were written in the language, etc. Think of C. What percentage of the worlds applications, including many of the run-time engines of the languages we are discussing have been written in C? All of them? Most of them? And id be suprised if language vendors in the C market have profitted from that language anywhere near as much as some the really profitable langauges like Java and VB.

Commercial usage has a lot more to do with fashion, marketing and FUD than it does with the utility of the language.

You really think so? I dont think the corporate world is generally as foolish as that. I think the market works out what is what eventually. For instance anyone who looks really closely at a proper Pascal implementation (not one of the later and fairly common pseudo-pascals that wasnt quite real pascal) would see that it is quite inferior to another language, quite similar in outward looking functionality, that being C. This has a pretty good overview of what I'm talking about. My point is that I don't think any propaganda would have lead to Pascal superceding C. And as we know we didnt see it happen. C ended up everywhere. Pascal didn't. C ended up everywhere. Lisp didn't. More recent past IMO also indicates the same, despite the huge hype behind Java it hasn't eliminated any of the main competitors on the scene when it started, there are still signifigant markets it hasnt penetrated (and probably wont). It snagged a chunk of market share, but is it holding on to it? Is it growing?

Personally I would much rather code an application in Common Lisp than I would in C++, and in my experience Lisp hackers are much closer to Perl hackers in outlook that Java/C++ folk.

How many programmers feel the same? Most I know from Uni hated lisp. More to the point, would your boss pay you to do so? Would he like to have to hire someone to replace you?

have to admit I don't see the same hacker/academic confrontation you see in the article. He comments on the fact that much language innovation has moved from the academic world into the industrial/open-source world, and says nice things about the result. That's a fact and the reasons he gives seem reasonable to me. He's not saying "hacker languages bad, academic good" or "academic languages good, hacker bad". I can't see that he's expressing any surprise that this has happened either.

Saying no. At points dripping with implications? Yes for sure. Lets just take the original posted paragraph:

Language design is being taken over by hackers.

Read: The enemy is at the gates! (Read the update at the bottom)

The results so far are messy, but encouraging.

Read: Even though what they are doing is interesting, its messy so we can still look down on it.

There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example.

We had better look out. These guys are on to something. :-(

Many are stunningly bad, but that's always true of ambitious efforts.

But dont worry. :-) We can still look down on them.

At its current rate of mutation, God knows what Perl might evolve into in a hundred years.

Read:Look these guys don't develop stuff, they put it down to wild chance and mutation. We dont need to worry about them. They'll be to the animals in a hundred years anyway.

Ok, i'm laying it on a bit thick, but I think of chunk of his stuff was along those lines. Incidentally I think that has been long been an internal rivalry between the "profs" or "suits" and the "hackers" (for lack of a better term), even in the academic enviornment. A number of extremely prominent and influential computer pioneers never graduated. In the industry we see many competent people without degrees or certification. So to discover that they are doing interesting things is hardly a shock.

Anyway, this whole thread has blown way out of proportion. (My fault :-( I went too far in my original post, but still feel that the underlying point (that nobody should be in any way suprised that innovation in our field can come from a hacker) was fair.