But since they wrote an interpreter for Lisp in C++, they couldn't have been that afraid, at least not all of them
Another interpretation is that this is like the “comb-over” syndrome. How does a middle-aged man end up with a comb-over, given that everybody knows it’s a lame look? The answer is that it creeps up on him day by day, there is no one moment in time when he asks himself, “Should I comb my hair over?”
Likewise, whenever you see a Greenspunned[1] system, there is rarely a moment in time when some bright and ambitious person decided that the right thing to do was to sit down and implement half of Common Lisp. Instead, they make a series of small daily decisions (add this, change that, add such-and-such a feature, whoops, to fix that bug we need to do this...) that end up accreting into an interpreter for Lisp.
I don’t know the whole story, perhaps they did decide to write such an interpreter right from the start. But it could be that they initially decided to write something very small and specific, but wound up with a comb-over.
> I have to ask though: Is Greenspunning such a bad thing?
Yes, because if you knew you needed Common Lisp, you'd just use CL, rather than an ad-hoc informally specified implementation of CL. In general, the half implementation has half the value of the 'real' implementation.
Another interpretation is that this is like the “comb-over” syndrome. How does a middle-aged man end up with a comb-over, given that everybody knows it’s a lame look? The answer is that it creeps up on him day by day, there is no one moment in time when he asks himself, “Should I comb my hair over?”
Likewise, whenever you see a Greenspunned[1] system, there is rarely a moment in time when some bright and ambitious person decided that the right thing to do was to sit down and implement half of Common Lisp. Instead, they make a series of small daily decisions (add this, change that, add such-and-such a feature, whoops, to fix that bug we need to do this...) that end up accreting into an interpreter for Lisp.
I don’t know the whole story, perhaps they did decide to write such an interpreter right from the start. But it could be that they initially decided to write something very small and specific, but wound up with a comb-over.
[1]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Greenspun%27s...