Discovering simplicity

Ted Neward takes a second look at Lisp, and likes what he sees:

The interesting thing I find, on second approach, is that Lisp is a fairly approachable language, assuming you've got Graham's book next to you to do it. He's done a good job (up through Chapter 2, anyway) of highlighting the key parts of Lisp--the fact that it's a very simple language in terms of its basic syntax and structure--without bogging you down too much in rhetoric and "clearly Lisp is the best of any language on the planet" propaganda. (Well, there is a bit of that last, but that's to be expected from Graham, particularly if you've read his "Hackers and Painters". It's not too unbearable, at least not thus far.) My next task is to find a Common Lisp implementation I can stick into a VPC/VMW image and start playing around with. Maybe I'll even think about giving a talk on it and how Lisp seems to have influenced other languages, a la Ruby.

Simplicity is the key here. The implementors of Java and .NET just don't get it on that score. They think it all revolves around having a a veritable ton of complexity wrapped in a set of wizards. It's the other way around...