On Friday the 11th of April, I'd like for us to be able to discuss Lisp: Good News, etc., Worse is Better is Worse, and Beating the Averages with respect to how they relate to our experiences so far with programming languages and their implementation. These are opinionated pieces, and I assume you will have your own reactions to them.
In what way is Gabriel right? Or, is his own rebuttal the correct answer? Or, worse yet, did he go soft on us, backing down from a radical-yet-right position? Graham goes on to suggest that the languages and tools we choose can give one an edge over competitors, yet... is he just drinking some kind of Kool-Aid? If Lisp and Scheme were so amazing, we'd all be using it for everything, right? Clearly, these are old-fashioned views, and Guy Steele's migration from Lisp to Java (as an implementer and designer) should be taken as all the evidence we need. (Granted, he has since moved on from Java to Fortress, so you'll have to decide what that means...)