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From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: <5256@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 12 Jan 91 08:40:55 GMT
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;>Common LISP effectively died from obesity.
;
;*And* still managed to leave out "neq".

It died because it was linked to AI and that died. The whole beauty of
list processing was that at one time it was seriously believed that 
thought was essentially list processing, and if you toss in recursion
you can accomodate self-consciousness too. A lisp machine was a machine
whose resident language was "the logic of thought." No one believes this
anymore, so lisp semantics have been relativized, and now it's in competition
with much faster languages which have no such pretensions, but which
are computationally equivalent. Still, Lisp is a nice langauge for
big, open-ended explorations into cognitive architectures written by
people who aren't macho about how fast they can feed numbers into
arrays; and interestingly, lisp has acquired a strong foothold in the
technoarts community, of which I'm a member. Lisp still has a distinctivbe
aesthetic feel to it that makes it seem to come closer to a screwball
"language of thought" than C for instance, even if you're only thinking 
about this as history, as a way of life that was more naive and more 
optimistic than we can be about what a brain machine was going to look 
like.