The profs don't have the best record (as in Pascal, Modula-2, Prolog, Lisp, Turing, APL, etc). I mean sure these languages all have their fine points, but writing business type apps in a reasonable timeframe for a reasonable budget doesn't seem to be one of them.

I have to disagree.

Pascal is hardly a fair example. At the time it first appeared it rocked - I'd much prefer it to FORTRAN or assembler. Now, of course, there are better options. At the time there were not. Language design improves, both inside and outside academia.

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.

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

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!

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

I find it mildly amusing that the Lisp FUD ("slow", "all those brackets make unmaintainable code", etc.) is so close to the Perl FUD ("slow", "all those $@% make unmaintainable code", etc.)

I find it even more amusing that things that used to be bad ("Common Lisp has this ghastly abstract machine that makes everything far to slow to be useful") suddenly become good ("Java has this great abstract machine that makes it portable"). There is a lot of truth in the line that languages become more like LISP as they grow up.

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.

I 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.

Did somebody with a PhD bite you when you were young? :-)