.Net: He will join us or die

Have I become a mere link blog? One of those newsy blogs that's constantly linking elsewhere and making snide comments, with no original content? How can I justify my existence if I'm just one more "talking head" poring over RSS feeds? What--ah, screw it.

Somehow I ended up at Lisp is sin while I was following a thread along the warp and woof of the Web. I'm glad I did. Sriram's main point is the same one that many others make: over time, everyone is rediscovering the features of Lisp. Sriram's unique spin is that the .Net side of the house may get there sooner. Some evidence: Linq, lsharp, fsharp (which I've reported on in other posts), anonymous delegates, iterators (what the rest of the world calls "generators"). In the example from the blog, the C# 2.0 delegate keyword appears to be the stand-in for lambda. Does a C# 2.0 anonymous delegate form a true closure, with its own lexically-scoped copy of the variables in effect at the time of definition? I don't know. At work we're not yet using 2.0, because our vendor isn't.

Once you finish digesting that link, which is long and informative, read this pdf document by Erik Meijer about how functional programming has reached (will reach) the masses in the form of Visual Basic. I don't know what to believe in anymore...

For Sriram, Lisp is sin because it tempts him to flirt with it over and over again, but without leading to deep, lasting satisfaction. According to him, because of obstacles like a steep learning curve and a lack of libraries, Lisp in its current state cannot thrive in the mainstream. In fact, people have foretold its death for years. A .Net advocate far more militant than Sriram might say, "Lisp and its brethen, or at least the features therein, will join .Net or die." (By the way, I personally believe that popular programming languages never die; they just get reincarnated).

Bonus link: It's not as if Joel on Software needs me linking to it, but in Language Wars he takes a pretty definite stance: for serious, scalable, maintainable, productive Web development, you have merely a handful of choices, but as long as you choose from that group, you can just use whatever you're most comfortable with since the alternatives are about equally capable. Python is "half" on his list, but Ruby and Lisp and Perl are not. Admittedly, I'm not in a cutting-edge startup (far from it), but I don't think he's giving the up-and-comers enough credit. This conservative, enterprise, entrenched approach to Web development has a great deal of inertia, so we shouldn't be surprised if something else shiny and new sneaks up from behind and takes over, like Java did to C++.