[NoahTheDuke]

I like the writing style and voice in this essay. I disagree with some of the assertions but I enjoyed my time reading, which doesn’t happen a lot with most tech-related essays.

I will say, however, that this paragraph felt like sour grapes:

> As examples, the scientific journal Guy Steele and I founded called Lisp and Symbolic Computation (LASC) had been renamed Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (HOSC), and my primary scientific conference called Lisp and Functional Programming (L&FP) had been renamed the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). I was discouraged for two reasons. One was that during the 1980s when functional programming researchers had few outlets, many of us Lispers kept the lights on at L&FP for them, and later when Lisp was on the decline, they shut the door. And the other is that this seemed to signal that my field of inquiry had been deleted by the academy.

All that’s changed is that Lisp isn’t primary anymore; they are both titled to allow other languages and other media to contribute to their respective focuses. Common Lisp is a good language but it’s not the final language nor even the final “programming medium”, so acting like it is artificially limits both Common Lisp users and future language designers who could all benefit from that cross-pollination.

Now maybe the change of names is shorthand for lisp actually being excluded from the journal and conference, which nullifies the above, but without doing any research at all lol, I doubt it.

[anamax]

Those other languages were able to contribute under the old names, when they couldn't publish elsewhere.

Where do the Lispers go now?

[NoahTheDuke]

The whole point of that section is that he wasn't there. He'd taken time away to get a Masters of Fine Arts, and this paragraph was his reaction to re-entering the world of programming and software. Coming back after 5 years and seeing that the journal he'd started that was focused on symbolic computation using Lisp has now expanded to include using other languages doesn't mean Lisp is forgotten.

I browsed the titles of a bunch of the articles published by the journal after the name change, and most of the were language agnostic but still lisp-adjacent and potentially lisp-relevant. (For example, Volume 12 Issue 1, the second year with the new name, has multiple articles about call/cc using demonstration languages.)