Friday 30 May 2008

God wrote in LISP: programming and genesis.

Did you ever ask yourself what programming language God used to implement the Universe? I mean, he had a pretty tight deadline - only 6 days - so he must have been using something rather high level. And a rather complex one to boot. And as a programmer, you don't have any doubts thet God must have been using a programming language for the task: without abstraction the task is just too complex ;-).

I came across this song while hearing the OOPSLA podcasts and everything became clear: he used LISP! Hear it here: ( >> )*. I must say, I really like it a lot. It's wonderful: it's like a hymn on a great, dead language. The lyrics come from Bob Kanefsky. All I could trace about him is that he wrote some parody songs, but he must be a programmer himself judging from the quality of lyrics.

And the lyrics are right: Object Oriented languages describe how we humans are thinking about the world, but LISP (or functional languages in general) describe the thoughts of God... so pure... ;-). Let me cite: "Don’t search the disk drive for man.c...". It's almost ontology, I like it :-).

PS: As always there is a monority opinion as well, see http://www.xkcd.com/224.

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