DIamonds and mud

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <gls@livia.east.sun.com>]

   From: William D Clinger <will@ccs.neu.edu>

   Someone (Alan Perlis?) once said that APL is like a beautiful
   crystal:  It looks great, but if you try to add anything to
   it you destroy the symmetries that make it beautiful.  Lisp,
   on the other hand, is a ball of mud.  It looks ugly, but you
   can add stuff to it without changing its character.

It was, if anyone, Joel Moses.  For more on this topic,
see the paper Dick Gabriel and I wrote ("The Evolution of Lisp")
in the proceedings of the second ACM History of Programming
Languages Conference, published in preprint form as an issue of
SIGPLAN Notices, and now newly out in book form from ACM Press (advt.).

--Guy