The Idea of Lisp

#1

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 12:19 PM UTC

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#2

Post by agentgt » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

The conditional expression or more specifically everything being an expression is my favorite thing about Lisp. I did not know that McCarthy pushed to add it to Algol which apparently today is the ternary operator for most languages.

It is annoying that so many languages (C, Java, C#, etc) have both a conditional statement (if-else) and conditional expression (ternary ?:). Really the if-else should be an expression (I think the ternary operator is hideous).

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#3

Post by kluck » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:48 PM UTC

Lisp was developed because McCarthy needed a tool for experimenting with AI. Found a video of McCarthy talking about AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozipf13jRr4

And if anyone cares, here is nice Shirt with McCarthy on it ;) https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/666689-john-mccarthy-lisp-...

I think it should be mandatory for CS students to implement their own little Lisp using the building blocks McCarthy described! Instead they are learning Java and ist crappy OO...

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#4

Post by lolive » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

kluck wrote: post #3

Lisp was developed because McCarthy needed a tool for experimenting with AI. Found a video of McCarthy talking about AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozipf13jRr4 And if anyone cares, here is nice Shirt with McCarthy on it ;) https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/666689-john-mccarthy-lisp-... I think it should be mandatory for CS students to implement their own little Lisp using the building blocks McCarthy described!…

Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter? That sounds like a fun experiment.

PS: Sorry, I am a Java OO developper. But I like to learn :)

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#5

Post by kriro » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

lolive wrote: post #4

kluck wrote: post #3

Lisp was developed because McCarthy needed a tool for experimenting with AI. Found a video of McCarthy talking about AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozipf13jRr4 And if anyone cares, here is nice Shirt with McCarthy on it ;) https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/666689-john-mccarthy-lisp-... I think it should be mandatory for CS students to implement their own little Lisp using the building blocks McCarthy described!…

Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter? That sounds like a fun experiment. PS: Sorry, I am a Java OO developper. But I like to learn :)

There's this classic by Peter Norvig (of AI a Modern Approach fame) about wrting a Lisp in Python...which also happens to have an amazing title :D

http://norvig.com/lispy.html

Edit: He also links to his Scheme interpreter in Java in that article: http://norvig.com/jscheme.html

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#6

Post by bpicolo » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

Does anybody have a few examples of DSLs people make in a lisp (ideally clojure because I have worked with it a tad)? I've seen plenty of cases where people make a pseudo-dsl via optional arguments, but not seen this so-oft mentioned "yeah we just wrote a dsl for it because lisp" sort of deal.

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#7

Post by kornakiewicz » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

lolive wrote: post #4

kluck wrote: post #3

Lisp was developed because McCarthy needed a tool for experimenting with AI. Found a video of McCarthy talking about AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozipf13jRr4 And if anyone cares, here is nice Shirt with McCarthy on it ;) https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/666689-john-mccarthy-lisp-... I think it should be mandatory for CS students to implement their own little Lisp using the building blocks McCarthy described!…

Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter? That sounds like a fun experiment. PS: Sorry, I am a Java OO developper. But I like to learn :)

For example: http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

But there's plenty more.

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#8

Post by GavinMcG » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

bpicolo wrote: post #6

Does anybody have a few examples of DSLs people make in a lisp (ideally clojure because I have worked with it a tad)? I've seen plenty of cases where people make a pseudo-dsl via optional arguments, but not seen this so-oft mentioned "yeah we just wrote a dsl for it because lisp" sort of deal.

http://beautifulracket.com/appendix/domain-specific-language...

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#9

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

kluck wrote: post #3

Lisp was developed because McCarthy needed a tool for experimenting with AI. Found a video of McCarthy talking about AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozipf13jRr4 And if anyone cares, here is nice Shirt with McCarthy on it ;) https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/666689-john-mccarthy-lisp-... I think it should be mandatory for CS students to implement their own little Lisp using the building blocks McCarthy described!…

While ML was the meta language for a theorem prover. Funny how these were side effects.

Re: The Idea of Lisp

#10

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:06 PM UTC

kornakiewicz wrote: post #7

lolive wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a kind of walkthrough/tutorial about how to develop a little Lisp interpreter? That sounds like a fun experiment. PS: Sorry, I am a Java OO developper. But I like to learn :)

For example: http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ But there's plenty more.

Another one https://github.com/kanaka/mal (quite famous AFAIK)