Ran into it when roaming the Rebol list..
http://paulgraham.com/popular.html
O yes...dont forget to click through it ;-) you'll see some nice things
also...the "ONLISP" book is downloadable ;-)
An enjoyable read with quite a few interesting angles (I liked the point about lisp as the scripting language of MIT).
I can really relate to
"A language also needs to have a book about it. The book should be thin, well-written, and full of good examples. K&R is the ideal here."
One of the reasons I've not moved to C++ is that I can always pick up K&R and quickly find my C answer. It's also an attraction of newLISP that it's not in C++ under the hood.
Absolutely! C++ takes a three pound book to describe all of the features we are never going to investigate because they look (ARE) so complicated.
Same about Java, except from a different standpoint. Libraries are good things, BUT, when facing a forest of classes and interfaces that interact with each other, a programmer is forced to spend three days to do a simple task because he has to figure out how all the interactions keep the program from working.
I disagree with the author about writing large programs in Perl though. Small programs aren't too bad. Large Perl programs, for me, are hard to maintain.
Eddie