Hassam: What would be your advice to young people today who want to get into the field of designing programming languages? Dr. Fahlman: Don’t! Unless you like to do this as a hobby. What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don’t become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility.