Revenge of the Nerds

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Are all programming languages equivalent? As programmers, we know the answer: no, some languages are better, for certain problems, than others.  Revenge of the Nerds, written by Paul Graham, is an article that talks about the diversity between programming languages, letting us see that not all languages are the same, although people who don't know much about computing and technology, think so only because it's a comfortable idea. It also talks about how the programming languages are more and more like Lisp.
 
Lisp was not designed to be a programming language...What? Yes, Graham explains that the beginning of Lisp, in fact, was an effort of John McCarthy, to define a more convenient alternative to the Turing Machine.
McCarthy said that another way to show that Lisp was neater than Turing machines was to write to universal Lisp function, briefer and more comprehensible: the Lisp function eval. This later transformed into a lisp interpreter when Steve Russell, programmed eval, resulting in a quite powerful programming language. Impressively unexpected! Lisp is not technology, Lisp is mathematics and math endures forever, that's why it's still so powerful.
 
Lisp was a pioneer, for example, it was the first programming language to support recursion, and we should not forget the macros. When Lisp first appeared, these ideas were far removed from ordinary programming practice, over time more and more languages were adopting these ideas and being more and more like Lisp.
 
Graham encourages again to work with unusual programming languages, explaining that the problems that can arise are not at all serious, however,  the power, the size and the time it takes to write programs in Lisp are a great advantage. ITA is a clear example of success, it ends its adversaries by the fast and efficient way in which they develop their software Again:  Do something weird!
 
 

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