41–50 of 207 posts
There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to ha…
There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to ha…
There are also plenty of Lisp programmers that think that it's a real tool to solve real problems, not just an educational oddity. There are a bunch of Lisps out there, and plenty of them are by no means toys. My laptop's initial RAM disk and init system are Scheme programs.
[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...
There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to ha…
Meanwhile, lisp is metaprogramming. No, it's not useful in many (or even most) applications, but when it is useful, you can bet there's some type of analogous pattern for a lisp-type language. Certainly still useful to learn along side ML. :)
Hell, the best quote to illustrate this is the article itself:
> A fun thing about it this is that once you’ve grokked it, you can think right away of better programming languages than Lisp, and you can think right away of better ways to write the meta descriptions than John did. This is the “POV = 80 IQ points” part.
In this sense, everyone should learn lisp, even if it's not the tool you intend to use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would rather watch Transformers then Citizen Kaine? Wat?
Attention spans are different now.
There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to ha…
There are also plenty of Lisp programmers that think that it's a real tool to solve real problems, not just an educational oddity. There are a bunch of Lisps out there, and plenty of them are by no means toys. My laptop's initial RAM disk and init system are Scheme programs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are also plenty of Lisp programmers that think that it's a real tool to solve real problems, not just an educational oddity. There are a bunch of Lisps out there, and plenty of them are by no means toys. My laptop's initial RAM disk and init system are Scheme programs.
And it's not a Lisp per se, but WebAssembly's text format uses s-expressions[0]. It's likely that the "oddity" of Lisps will seem less odd as adoption increases if they stick with that. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...
Posting Alan's reply as a comment below for posterity, since Quora appears to forbid archive.org from making a copy. --- First, let me clear up a few misconceptions from the previous answers. One of them said “Try writing an operating system with Lisp”, as though this would be somehow harder. In fact, one of the nicest operating systems ever done was on “The Lisp Machines” (in Zeta-Lisp), the hardware and software fo…
Look, I love Lisp as much as the next hacker, but is Alan Kay for real? Where's the Lisp equivalent to this C code?
https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/blinker0...
More importantly, where's the accompanying toolchain? Seriously, I really want to know because I'd love, Love, LOVE to play around with it.
There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to ha…
What about typed Racket? https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/beginning.html
I disagree with the "single ... language" right off the bat before any deeper considerations. Lisp is a great collection of design patterns for making languages. > The key was not so much “Lisp” but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes. > A fun thing about it this is that once you’ve grokked it, you can think right…
> Or else, you didn't really grok it. Only if you believe that the only good thing one should grok is the data/code parity part. For me Smalltalk is even better and more concise than Lisp is.
I'm not seeing this from looking at various Rosetta Code examples.
This is really well written and seems to agree with the traditional FP lore. I'm curious what led Alan Kay then to OOP in Smalltalk.
Whatever Alan Kay thinks OOP is, it isn't what we think it is.