I find it strange that the original author only suggested proprietary alternatives (Lisp Machines, Mathematica), noting that Common Lisp itself not immune from these same criticisms. What's also interesting is this:
Java itself, at its helm had/has people such as Guy Steele who knew that since people would be unwilling to adopt languages such as Common Lisp or Smalltalk, best they could hope would be to "sneak" many of the features these languages originated (reflection, generic programming, garbage collection, DSLs, object orientation) to the people who would benefit the most from them. Java was a great covert vehicle for this "feature-sneaking", with its C-like syntax and enterprise buzzwords.
Now with Scala and Clojure (as well as Jython and JRuby), it seems like this an even more ambitious to sneak powerful programming tools and paradigms (dynamically typed languages, functional languages) to the professional programmer community, this time by saying "this is just a jar/war file".
If the goal is adoption of proper Lisp-from-ground up architecture, then sure this "sneaky" approach isn't going to get anyone there. But what if the goal is better code and more productive coders?
How much impact had Guy Steele on the design of Java? My guess was always that Java was mostly designed when he arrived and he was hired for his experience in standards and his writing capabilities. Given that Mr. Steele co-wrote a book on C, worked on the standard for High Performance Fortran, the CL standard, and other things.
Java itself, at its helm had/has people such as Guy Steele who knew that since people would be unwilling to adopt languages such as Common Lisp or Smalltalk, best they could hope would be to "sneak" many of the features these languages originated (reflection, generic programming, garbage collection, DSLs, object orientation) to the people who would benefit the most from them. Java was a great covert vehicle for this "feature-sneaking", with its C-like syntax and enterprise buzzwords.
Now with Scala and Clojure (as well as Jython and JRuby), it seems like this an even more ambitious to sneak powerful programming tools and paradigms (dynamically typed languages, functional languages) to the professional programmer community, this time by saying "this is just a jar/war file".
If the goal is adoption of proper Lisp-from-ground up architecture, then sure this "sneaky" approach isn't going to get anyone there. But what if the goal is better code and more productive coders?