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798 points bertman | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.305s | source
1. dekhn ◴[] No.45903061[source]
Frankly I think this is inevitable- it's practically one of the laws of computing: any sufficiently complex system will ultimately require a turing-complete language regardless of its actual necessity.

See also: """Zawinski's Law states: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."""" and """Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states:[1][2]

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."""

(from the above I conclude that if you want to take over the computer world, implementing a mail reader with an embedded Lisp).