Not Lisp again (2009)
funcall.blogspot.com
Not Lisp again (2009)
1–10 of 276 posts
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#2Weird lineage-jumping: Bill Siebert, in his other career as a hearing researcher, is my academic grandfather.
His textbook on signals and systems is one of the two classics in the field -- i wonder, now, how much commonality there is between that and his LISP experience.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#32009 should be added to the title.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#4Weird lineage-jumping: Bill Siebert, in his other career as a hearing researcher, is my academic grandfather. His textbook on signals and systems is one of the two classics in the field -- i wonder, now, how much commonality there is between that and his LISP experience.
[deleted]
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#5I was similarly impressed when reading the first chapter of SICP (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), which shows the same code examples. In a very few elegant lines, without explaining much syntax, some very fundamentals of computing are explained. I can only recommend to read the book, even if "Lisp programmer" is not on the career plan.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#6The objections the author had way back in the day are no longer the objections programmers of mainstream languages have to Lisp today.
Today the objections I hear are more along the lines of:
1 - All those parenthesis. (Still a top objection)
2 - Lisp doesn't look like or work like what I'm used to.
3 - Lisp doesn't have as many libraries as the most popular mainstream programming languages.
4 - There aren't nearly as many Lisp programmers, so it'll be hard to find more to join your project/company if you use Lisp.
5 - There aren't nearly as many Lisp jobs, so why bother learning Lisp if you're going to have a hard time finding work using it?
6 - Lisp is ancient, and anything that old is useless and primitive compared to new and shiny languages.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#72009 should be added to the title.
Why? It's an article written about an experience in 1983. The article's publish date is pretty irrelevant.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#8I have to admit, the slightly misleading title got me. I'm currently going through SICP myself (albeit at a snail's pace), but it seems like the article's author and I both had the same initial objections to LISP, only to be blown away by its simplicity and expressiveness with a few keywords and lines of code. I'm still partial to other programming languages, but LISP holds a special place in my hard drive.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#9The derivative examples are almost magical to watch. I highly recommend that section for anyone interested.
Re: Not Lisp again (2009)
#102009 should be added to the title.
The URL already says blogspot.com, that would be redundant.