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In my opinion both high and low level languages will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, especially given that Murphy's law does not work any more, at least regarding the performance. Current renaissance of native languages is probably related to ever-increasing complexity of software built from too many pieces, which makes it harder to reliably control program behavior and introduces multiple points of failure.

As things developed in those languages being a pain, I've never had that experience at all. I just like being able to use the software on any platform I want.

Well... try running a Java program on Raspberry Pi or a .NET 4.0 program under Linux... Granted, those are exotic examples, but generally my experience with Java/Python programs under Windows is troublesome (since I'm not a Java/Python developer I don't have up-to-date runtimes and tend to run into rough edges), and the same applies to .NET programs under Linux.

Anyway, I agree that we better stop here before we go deeper into discussion of each other's anecdotal evidence.

P.S. Compilers are still less efficient than humans (PDF) (because of their genericity, TANSTAAFL).

Of course, Sony is a big company, and just because their games division seems to hate Linux

Well, Naughty Dog, the developers of the Uncharted series, use Linux: The Technology of UNCHARTED: Drake's Fortune (.pdf, 6.6 MB) .

To be fair, for a while Naughty Dog's website had a streaming video-type trailer of their upcoming game. I don't know if it's there now since I haven't been there lately to look.

It looked a bit like Tomb Raider, except the main character is male, the setting is mundane, and the action scenes look a bit repetetive. Nothing in it really wowed me, so it was insufficient to sell me on a PS3, and Naughty Dog is one of the two companies that would have sold me on it if the price were lower. (The other was Insomniac.)

I'm sorry to hear that, CaseM, but let's face it, you did feed their false hope by buying a PSP and at least one UMD movie. It's only (somewhat) natural that they're counting on you to buy more. And then, remember that there are a great many people who have bought more.

The larger a business gets, the less likely it is to see its customers as anything but statistics, customer turnover and market penetration. They see positive numbers and frisk about happily because they're succeeding. They see negative numbers and scowl and desperately feel the need to change something to make the numbers positive again, even if it shoots future success in the foot.

I've actually seen only one thing that could convince me to buy a PSP: the promise of an eventual Naughty Dog release for it. Before I shell out the bucks for a $250 console that I can misplace, I want to see more.

Although i have never programming, my first college leve CSCI class used SCHEME (a direct descendant of Lisp if i remember correctly) as the language.

This language is structed very difficult for a new computer science student to easily understand.

The endless parenthesis does not help either.

And, on top of this, the language is completely dead!

I much rather would have learned an assembly language. This would have given students a better feel for the hardware and would have had useful applications.

Have people here played Jak'n' Daxter (or Jak II) on the PS2 ?
It features an enormous world, with many levels. And no loading time
between them. Roaming around the world, and among diffrent levels etc. is totally smooth.
Developers got a thing or two to learn from it.

If you want to build complex systems fast, nobody is going to turn to LISP for a solution. There isn't one. LISP is a beautiful language which I think any programmer would benefit to learn, but its not a language to get things done with.

LISP is a powerful and interesting language and as a language has its merits. I don't mean to pick on LISP.

What irks me is not that Paul Graham is saying this, but that he might get listened to

Due out tomorrow Jak and Daxter looks like a worthy Crash Bandicoot replacement.

The Game is produced by Naughty Dog.

A preview at IGNhttp://ps2.ign.com/previews/16447.html

If you liked Kolona 2, this should be right up your alley.

Whoever told you ACL is _extremely fast_ was lying through their teeth. Probably either an Allegro rep or else one of these academics who use ACL to "prove" their postulate that LISP can be fast. Maybe compared to interpreted LISP, ACL *is* extremely fast! But the compiler we have written in ACL is extremely slow, and we have spent quite a lot of effort optimizing it. Effort we could have easily spent elsewhere if we had just written the damned compiler in C++.

ACL is certainly powerful, and it is possible to make code run almost as fast as C code - but "possible" in this case means augmenting your source code with reams and reams of auxiliary information. We once tried to optimize a simple function in the compiler, and it took about 4 hours, and the size of the function grew by a factor of 3. Apply this to any large-scale project and you've suddenly shown that ACL is not a viable platform if speed is an issue.

Sorry dude but this misinformation about ACL has got to be trashed. It takes a while [longer than I've got] to explain to newbies why LISP is such an inherently slow language, and I do appreciate that Allegro have made a compiler which is almost workable for small-scale projects. ACL contains many, many extremely clever features. I admire the programmers for making LISP even vaguely workable in speed terms. But to say that they've succeeded in making LISP a viable alternative to C/C++ is at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright lie.

CLOS is a piece of shit too, but that's a different post.