Modern Languages vs the Ancient... (Was Metaprogramming)

[Dmitrii Dimandt]

I've reposted your message on Russian
rsdn.ru<http://gzip.rsdn.ru/Forum/Message.aspx?mid=2074189&only=1>
.

One of the questions to this post
is<http://gzip.rsdn.ru/Forum/Message.aspx?mid=2075163&only=1>:
which problems, exactly, are unsolvable, or hard to solve with modern
languages? Not specific Lisp hacks, but a list of real-life problems would
be nice.

:)

On 8/24/06, Rudolph van Graan <rvg@REDACTED> wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> This whole topic interest me greatly. Unfortunately I've not been
> part of the Lisp generation ;) - my only experience in Lisp stems
> from the fact that I had to make emacs work for me. To date Lisp is
> the greatest mystery ever. I've managed to salvage one good book
> which someone else threw away, written in 1982 "Lisp" by Winston and
> Horn. What amazes me is the type of problems solved in the late
> seventies. From the TOC:
>
> Chapter 18: Lisp in Lisp (Building an interpreter)
>          24: Symbolic pattern matching
>          26: Rule based expert systems and forward chaining
>          30: Procedure writing programs
>
> etc
>
> What worries me is that the "old" languages managed to do things that
> are nearly impossible or very difficult (in my opinion) to do in
> modern languages. How come the Javas and C#'s etc lost these
> abilities and be called modern?

...

> Back to my original point - what kind of abilities did we lose going
> from Lisp/Smalltalk into the VB's/Delphi's/C++ into Java/C# etc that
> are now being reinvented in a bad way in the new "languages"?
>
>
> Rudolph
>
>
>
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