Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Java frustrates the absolute shit out of me. An objectively terrible language coupled with insanely great garbage collectors, insanely great JIT compilers, and insanely great IDEs.

Why couldn't we have had these things for Lisp?* I mean, if 1/1000 of the intellectual horsepower that's been thrown at Java had been thrown at Lisp, we'd all be driving to work in orbit-capable flying cars that used a teaspoon of fuel per year.

* Of course Lisp invented the insanely great IDE around 1984 but then everybody forgot about it and had to rediscover the idea 30 years later.

Clojure is around and still going strong! I mean the IDE experience is probably not what you're describing, but you can use the JVM with a mature, productive Lisp language.

Fair point.

To me, Clojure is an "almost-lisp" because of its lack of cons cells, its use of all the brackets on the keyboard, and its dependence on the JVM which can't do tail jumps.

I love Common Lisp because it compiles down to the metal and you can write code with it that starts instantly and runs very fast.

But all the above is more about personal taste than anything else, so maybe I should try Clojure again.