I came for the information on Lisp and stayed for the discussion on language design. Language design has always fascinated me because at one point or the other over the last few years I’ve used every major language either professionally or for hobby projects.
One thing I’ve never understood is why backwards compatibility isn’t top of mind for the language creators. It makes every single piece of open-source code a learning example for newcomers. This is important because they (the newcomers) may not have the requisite ecosystem knowledge to set up the old interpreters or compilers. It would also force you (the designer) to think really careful about what should come included in the base installation.
This article is a long one but if Lisp has ever piqued your fancy, this would be a good blog post to dive into.
Thanks for reading and as always, all comments, critiques and questions are highly appreciated. Here's a link to the
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