It was the idea that "Fundamental ideas are portable ideas" I was having problems with. Some are. Some aren't.
I love Lisp - and love the fact that other languages do more of the things that Lisp does. But in some cases it's taken decades for those features to get general acceptance. Fundamental ideas don't seem any more or less likely to become portable.
To pick another example - I can remember being actively mocked by many different people in the eighties for the idea that any of object-oriented languages, garbage collected languages, or languages running on virtual machines would ever be used outside of academia (despite the fact that I was working on a RAD environment that included all three with some very happy industry customers :-)
Fundamental ideas don't seem any more or less portable than any other kind of idea as far as I can see - the context and the language used to express the idea is much more important.
It was the idea that "Fundamental ideas are portable ideas" I was having problems with. Some are. Some aren't.
I love Lisp - and love the fact that other languages do more of the things that Lisp does. But in some cases it's taken decades for those features to get general acceptance. Fundamental ideas don't seem any more or less likely to become portable.
To pick another example - I can remember being actively mocked by many different people in the eighties for the idea that any of object-oriented languages, garbage collected languages, or languages running on virtual machines would ever be used outside of academia (despite the fact that I was working on a RAD environment that included all three with some very happy industry customers :-)
Fundamental ideas don't seem any more or less portable than any other kind of idea as far as I can see - the context and the language used to express the idea is much more important.