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Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 06:00:10 +1100
Subject: Re: How security holes happen
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:67870

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 5:42 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 16:54:59 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>
>> I don't think Lisp was really originally designed.
>
> The history of Lisp is described here in detail:
>
> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html
>
> Like all complex systems, it did not appear fully-formed in a flash of
> inspiration. It was both designed and evolved through experimentation.
> That process of *trying things* and keeping those that work is usually
> called "design".

There's a difference between iterative design of that nature and
initial design. An initial clean design is a good basis for further
iterative design; a messy initial design means backward compatibility
shackles you. "Originally designed" is different from "constantly
worked on".

But Lisp has enough variants that the backward compat issue isn't as
major. There's no specific need for Scheme to maintain every mistake
of Common Lisp, or Clojure to support everything that elisp does.

ChrisA