It is ironic that this will, after my death, probably be the one thing that anyone remembers from my writing. I was just a punk when Common Lisp was standardized by a bunch of guys who'd been writing Lisp code for 10 years or more. Although I contributed a few fixes and minor improvements to the Lisp Machine operating system, I was always more interested in application programs and put 99 percent of my effort into building some big computer-aided engineering systems. So I definitely don't belong in the pantheon of Lisp Gods. I'm an impatient pragmatist and hate to spend time working on tools. When I start a project, I survey my friends who are experts to find out what the best tools are, and then run with it. So when I was a nerdlet at MIT it was the MIT Lisp Machine. When I was building my first large-scale multi-user Internet applications, it was Oracle.



-- Philip Greenspun, September 27, 2003