Catalogue of the very choice collection of books forming the library of William F. Fowle, esquire, of Boston, Mass., which will be sold by auction, by ... ... the 20th, 21st, and 22d of December ..

That is in fact the defining quality of Lisp: it was in order to make this so that McCarthy gave Lisp the shape it has. 13.3. Where Languages Matter Even if Lisp does represent a kind of limit that mainstream languages are approaching asymptotically, does that mean you should actually use it to write software? How much do you lose by using a less powerful language? Isn't it wiser, sometimes, not to be at the very edge of innovation? And isn't popularity to some extent its own justification? Isn't the pointy-haired boss right, for example, to want to use a language for which he can easily hire programmers? There are, of course, projects where the choice of programming language doesn't matter much. As a rule, the more demanding the application, the more leverage you get from using a powerful language. But plenty of projects are not demanding at all. Most programming probably consists of writing little glue programs, and for little glue programs you can use any language that you're already familiar with and that has good libraries for whatever you need to do ...»