Dyanamic Languages, Part L

Lisp implementations are nearly 50 years old! The ideas go back publicly 50 years to John McCarthy's participation in the Dartmouth AI project in 1956. By 1960, McCarthy had reported publicly on his team's implementation experience.

Here is a two-line status report on dynamic languages 50 years later, quoting from another blog in another debate...

• If you want a great experience for .NET/Java devs, you’ll typically publish schemas (through wsdl) and support SOAP.
• If you want a great experience for LAMP folks, you’ll support POX messages and will provide a non-XSD description of your formats.

And so I would summarize the status of dynamic languages like this: they are mainstream, they are everywhere, and they are so misunderstood.

Update: Phil Windley has some recent items on Lisp.