/tech/ - Technology

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author

There is no language without macros. Programmers will either poorly reimplement eval or suddenly start to write m4 or even C preprocessor.

>>22118
I know Guy Steele definitely has some idea what he was talking about when he said this since he literally made scheme and was involved with Common Lisp standardization efforts but I really have no idea what he could have meant by this

>>22139
Just some guesses from the top of my head:
>garbage collection
<unheard of at the time in general purpose languages outside of lisp and smalltalk
>dynamic typing
<casting between sub- and superclasses
<before generics many data structures casted specific types into generic objects and vice-versa
>strong typing
<exceptions on invalid casts
>bytecode
<native compilation as a form of caching
>kitchen sink standard library
<see greenspun's tenth law

>>22140
outing myself as someone who has never touched C++ because I value what remains of my sanity but I completely fucking forgot that it used to be the norm to not even have things like garbage collection and a big standard library

>java
no, after the revolution everything will be rewritten to either go, rust or c and you WILL enjoy it
every book, compiler and source code made for other programming languages WILL be outlawed and you WILL be hunted down as the counter-revolutionary scum you are if you try anything funny

>>22142
Forth programs will hate you, they spent years thinking that everything is a stack and routine in reverse polish notation. It is still used because it is one step above assembly.