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Lispers

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Re: Lispers

#12

Fanatics deliberately abandon objective judgement. Many of the quotes makes me question the authors experience. Everything is relative. Compared to Fortran, Lisp is all that and more. Compared to modern languages (say, Haskell), not so much.

> Many of the quotes makes me question the authors experience

Do you have enough experience that you dare to judge him?

> Compared to modern languages (say, Haskell), not so much.

I disagree. I was in a lot of languages, in all different programming styles. Lisp still is the language with a maximum of freedom of programming, probably also regarding productivity. Only Nim comes close.

Haskell may look elegant at the surface, regarding productivity however I don't recommend it except for DSL and compiler construction. If you are not a world class expert in Haskell then in most cases Haskell takes a lot more time for development than other languages (say Lisp, Python, C++, even Rust).

Re: Lispers

#13
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But was it Clojure or perhaps functional programming in general that "changed how you think about programming"?

I can't answer for GP, but to me personally, I had prior experience in both Haskell and Erlang before jumping into Clojure. And I can say that I share the feeling: Lisp changed the way I approach programming. Probably metaprogramming (the all-mighty macros & co.) and REPL-driven development are the two most important things I learned from Clojure (and Lisp in general). And I won't say that the paradigm shift to funct…

Haskell also supports metaprogramming and a REPL, these are not unique to Lisp. But granted, Lisp's syntax makes metaprogramming very convenient.

Re: Lispers

#14
post #5

Lisp is a beautiful language (or, to be more precise, set of languages). It is absolutely essential to a computer science education. It also gets unwieldy when programs get complex.

Lisp is the best language for any task that does not require types.

Re: Lispers

#15

What are some examples of open source Lisp projects and codebases whose features and elegance could have only been executed as well as they are in the language, or are just great codebases in general to study?

For Common Lisp people always recommend Edi Weitz's software like CL-PPCRE: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/

https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre

Re: Lispers

#16
post #10

Fanatics deliberately abandon objective judgement. Many of the quotes makes me question the authors experience. Everything is relative. Compared to Fortran, Lisp is all that and more. Compared to modern languages (say, Haskell), not so much.

Haskell appeared in 1990. Around 1987 I was as a student sitting in front of a real Lisp Machine, a Symbolics 3600, running in an AI research lab for natural language interaction. The machine with a stack-based CPU ran an object-oriented operating system written in a million lines of Lisp, with full source code and runtime changes. There is nothing which will blow your mind like that.

Those amazing Lisp machines were far ahead of their time. Unfortunately the hardware was very expensive, and it lacked power. Today we have the right cheap hardware. Actually, there is a Lisp revival going on in the OSS community. Consider McClim [1] for instance which attempts to port the amazing GUI of the Lisp Machines to PCs. It already works.

[1] https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/

Re: Lispers

#17
post #14
post #5

Lisp is a beautiful language (or, to be more precise, set of languages). It is absolutely essential to a computer science education. It also gets unwieldy when programs get complex.

Lisp is the best language for any task that does not require types.

You can add static type checking in Lisp anytime if you want. Consider the discussion at [1].

[1] http://compgroups.net/comp.lang.lisp/static-type-checking-in....

Re: Lispers

#18
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't answer for GP, but to me personally, I had prior experience in both Haskell and Erlang before jumping into Clojure. And I can say that I share the feeling: Lisp changed the way I approach programming. Probably metaprogramming (the all-mighty macros & co.) and REPL-driven development are the two most important things I learned from Clojure (and Lisp in general). And I won't say that the paradigm shift to funct…

Haskell also supports metaprogramming and a REPL, these are not unique to Lisp. But granted, Lisp's syntax makes metaprogramming very convenient.

AFAIK Haskell doesn't support metaprogramming. Perhaps you mean "Template Haskell"?
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