Ron Garret, a programmer and Lisp developer, blogs about programming languages, Arc, AI, religion, and technology business.
HN links it for his essay on what programming languages are for, his take on Arc, and a post on Time Machine data loss.
This is from the same Erann Gat (aka Ron Garret) who wrote the popular lisp at the JPL essay[1], and it covers some of the same ground.
His last point, that lisp can and should be improved, is one that he makes periodically. There's a barrier to some improvements to Common Lisp caused by the fact that the standard has been long closed and doesn't look like it will be reopened, but there have been improvement in areas that are outside of the standard.
For example both Ron's extended post and the previous hn discussion of this post note the pain of finding and installing lisp libraries. Quicklisp beta was recently released which relieves a significant amount of that pain.
[1]http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Edit: I noticed this in the previous posting of this thread:
Ron> For the record, I did not submit this article, and specifically declined a request to do so. It's not that I don't stand by what I wrote (I do) but it was written for a specific audience at a specific time and I don't think it deserves the attention that it's getting now.
...
akkartik> I noticed. http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.html Thanks.
For those who missed the context of this post, its author is the same Ron Garret who recently wrote "My take on Arc" (http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-take-on-arc.html, posted on Hacker News at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107623). Those who noticed the name of this post's author, Erann Gat, could easily be confused: he changed his name to Ron Garret several years ago (http://www.flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html).
Time Machine makes backing up trivial to the extent that you have a sufficiently large HFS volume sitting around, and don't need to back up MySQL databases. And if you're unlucky, it can also automate the process of losing all your data:
http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/09/time-machine-time-bomb.html
I noticed. http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.html
Thanks.
Update from 2008: http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.html
I hate plaigarism.
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-geek-business-myths.html