It’s really impressive to think what was achieved with such limited hardware compared to today’s standards. While languages like Clojure are rediscovering these concepts, it feels like we took a significant detour along the way.
I suspect this has historical roots. In the 1980s, Lisp was primarily used in universities and a small number of companies due to the then-high hardware demands for features like garbage collection, which we now consider commonplace. Meanwhile, people who could afford personal computers were constrained by very basic hardware, making languages such as C or Fortran a practical choice. Consequently, the vast majority of developers lacked exposure to alternative paradigms. As these devs entered industry and academia, they naturally taught programming based on their own experiences. Hence why the syntax and semantics of most mainstream languages can be traced back to C.
It’s really impressive to think what was achieved with such limited hardware compared to today’s standards. While languages like Clojure are rediscovering these concepts, it feels like we took a significant detour along the way.
I suspect this has historical roots. In the 1980s, Lisp was primarily used in universities and a small number of companies due to the then-high hardware demands for features like garbage collection, which we now consider commonplace. Meanwhile, people who could afford personal computers were constrained by very basic hardware, making languages such as C or Fortran a practical choice. Consequently, the vast majority of developers lacked exposure to alternative paradigms. As these devs entered industry and academia, they naturally taught programming based on their own experiences. Hence why the syntax and semantics of most mainstream languages can be traced back to C.