I love lispers. I always learn something from their writings, and generally admire their prose. There seems to be some correlation between deftness of expression in fingernail-clipping languages and deftness of expression in English.

I don't quote the above part as an example of that, but rather because I find the contrast to be damned funny. Somewhere in the deep, misty recesses of history there was a divinely-inspired Ryu for some natural language that was an ascestor to English, and that Ryu said that sentences were simple - subject, verb, and an optional direct object: "Thag hunt beast", or "Narg die".

Yet those who want an obscenely simple syntactic kernel to build everything on seem to be adroit with compound-complex sentences, replete with gerunds, prepositional and participle phrases, appositives, interjections, and modifiers galore.

Just once I'd like to see a critique of a syntactically complex functional language like haskell that's written entirely in caveman. It would sound more honest.