When I worked at Taligent and Apple in the mid 90's, there was a T-shirt that you'd see a lot. It said "Windows 95 = Macintosh 89". And it was true. Unfortunately, it was also true (but never spoken) that "Macintosh 95 = Macintosh 89". Fortunately (mostly) for Macintosh users, that's no longer true -- the Macintosh platform is growing and evolving, at least in a technical sense.

Lisp is largely in the same place, except that the time period is longer. This post was prompted by Philip Greenspun's post "What do they do at the Lisp Conference?" and to a lesser extent by a pointer to the Symbolics Museum. Now, I've been posting away about the virtues of Lisp and Lisp like languages in an effort to educate folks about what Lisp can do. But I certainly don't think that there's no room for advancement. So it was a little disturbing to read this

Could he be right? Is old-style Common Lisp or Scheme actually the best that we can do?

in Greenspun's post. Not because Greenspun believes it, but because I think a lot of people in the Lisp community appear to believe it. It's not enough to say Python/Ruby/C#/Java 2003 = Lisp 1982.