Hailed Eris: > One serious question today would be: what's LISP _really_ good for?
It's not LISP, but I've found Haskell good for writing terse code that works. Once you get your code past the type checker, it's likely to just work for the forseeable future if it's pure. Most tricky code ends up pure, since the transforms are usually the more extensive, interesting, and clever (ie difficult to debug) part of a (especially pipeline-based) program. I don't really care that a language is or is not close to the machine, if the compiler (ie GHC) gets it in the same order of magnitude runtime as C. In fact, I'd rather manipulate lists with higher-order functions, and just get the job done, than hack around with this year's new idioms to make C all things to all people. Best tool for the job and all that: C has a great niche as an OS language, but sometimes it's better just to write less, more stable code (eg xmonad vs any C-based window manager). Jason Catena
