Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

Why does it seem that people find LISP first, and then do post-hoc justification by spoken language analogy?

I was really excited for an article about the merits of clojure or LISP for a problem the author was solving.

Instead we get hand waving and some elegant, but abstract analogies.

I had guessed this was about clojure before I followed the link, somehow, I think because in part, I feel the same way. Is this common? Anyone else feel like clojure is, or is on the path to becoming, the perfect language?

I won't say I'll never need anything else or will stop learning new languages, but it feels...complete. I still use C for algorithmically simple, memory- and time-sensitive tasks, and I still use perl and awk for line-oriented text munging, but I feel like all the other languages I used to use for less specific tasks have fallen by the wayside. Java, C++, Python, Ruby...I don't really have a reason to touch these anymore. Am I the only one?

(all this aside, I swear, one of these days I am going to get my f*ing head around type systems and get a workable understanding of haskell and scala)

similar situation here. except i picked Common LISP.

for a couple of reasons: speed of your app; SLIME is great; more documentation (books); a long history :)

I'll disagree.

The features you listed apply to other languages much better than they do to English (except the bit about influential countries.) Chinese has a richer vocabulary, is more succinct and has a much less sophisticated grammatic system than English. If you want to get rid of the daunting logosyllabic way of writing, go Korean. Almost the same advantages, with one of the most beautiful and simple alphabets in the world. If you want an even easier language, Bhasa (Indonesian) is probably your choice. Don't forget there's Esperanto, too. Arguably much better suited as a 'world' (or at least pan-Euro-American) language.

In fact, English sucks as a `common' language from a lot of perspectives: it's got a very peculiar grammar. In fact, linguists concentrating their efforts on English has crippled a lot of research, and people are realizing (have been for a while, outside of the Anglo-Saxon area) that the paradigms that worked for English are pretty misplaced for other languages.

English is an almost isolating language with a lot of inflection-based traits, a weird and very specific tense system, remnants of case that confuse the hell out of people, a fiendishly difficult preposition-system to replace case (including weirdness such as preposition stranding and long-distance dependencies,) very rich and productive idiomatic mechanisms and one roller coaster of an orthography (mostly due to its uncompromisingly inconsistent way of adoption of vocabulary.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on English. All languages are beautiful (except Volapük.) I'm just sick and tired of people with, very often, little to no linguistic authority making claims about the language's viability or suitability to be a language spoken world wide. As a linguist, you hear that all the time, and you just get tired of it :-(

The only bit that matters - the reason I (an expat from an ex-socialist country living in western Europe, but not England) am talking to you over the Internet in English - is the cultural (and primarily militaristic!) dominance of the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants (i.e. Britain, America, Australia.) In fact, it's probably mostly due to Britain's vast empire in post-medieval times.