I’m up at night watching Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and in the special features, there are set of fake 50s style documentaries on the different animals in the movie. The first one is called:
Sloths: Natures Loveable Lisper
Thanks to a wonderful naming idea from 50 years ago, we have a mascot:
I don’t know about you, but I’m just a little less proud than I was 5 minutes ago. How about this?
There, I feel a little bit better. A note to all aspiring computational revolutionaries: ask a normal person what your great language name makes them think of. You might be surprised what you find out.
Of course, I think this lesson has been well learned because all of the new languages have cool names. Thankfully, this is one way that new languages are not becoming more like Lisp!
[…] Fortunately, the gulf between programming languages isn’t as great as it was in 1992 when PAIP was published. While languages like C and C++ are hard to beat for performance and OS interaction, newer languages like Python and Ruby (and even Java/C# with garbage collection) deal more with computation than direct hardware manipulation. Fortunately they haven’t followed Lisp in all ways! […]