Then I tried writing a Common Lisp version
… Then I tried writing a Common Lisp version. Opening a file, iterating over lines, hashing words and getting 0 as default, and sorting are all reasonably easy in CL, but splitting a line into words is a whole project on its own. And getting a command-line argument requires implementation-specific facilities that aren't standardized by CL! At least string-downcase exists. It was a lark, so I didn't finish. (In Forth you'd almost have to write something equivalent to Knuth's Pascal, because it doesn't come with even hash tables and case conversion.) My experience with Smalltalk is more limited but similar. You can do anything you want in it, it's super flexible, the tooling is great, but almost everything requires you to just write quite a bit more code than you would in Perl, Python, Ruby, JS, etc. And that means you have more bugs, so it takes you longer. And it doesn't really want to talk to the rest of the world—you can forget about calling a Squeak method from the Unix command line. …
Original discussionForth: The programming language that writes itself168 source comments · at import