Ruby and Lisp, sitting in a tree…
Saturday, January 13th, 2007(I just submitted this story to Slashdot, but I didn’t want to see this masterpiece get lost in the bowels of their submission queue, so I’m also posting it here. Update: it got accepted)
The developers of Rubinius, an experimental Ruby interpreter inspired by SmallTalk, have been discussing the possibility of adding a Lisp dialect to their VM. Pat Eyler collected some ideas and opinions from the people involved and it makes for some interesting reading.
For many, Ruby already is an acceptable Lisp, and the language itself started as a perlification of Lisp (even Matz says so) so it is perhaps fitting and might help explain why the whole idea feels right.
Now, if someone added support for VB and gave it the respect it deserves, the world would be a better place.