What's Special About Lisp?
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What's Special About Lisp?
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#2Really like this counterpoint after all the LISP elitists so often snub other langs. The Ruby version is much more elegant and readable, in this little example. Would love to see more comparisons, specifically hacking around the lack of macros in other langs.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#3Really like this counterpoint after all the LISP elitists so often snub other langs. The Ruby version is much more elegant and readable, in this little example. Would love to see more comparisons, specifically hacking around the lack of macros in other langs.
Being a Lisp enthousiast myself I often find those LISP elitists are people new to the language repeating the tired arguments we have heard so often before.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#4Look if you want a language thats actually new and people are doing stuff with it go to clojure.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#5The macro example used is meant to be instructive, not a demonstration of how powerful macros could be.
Consider https://gist.github.com/1119534, which demonstrates a pattern-matching syntax that (at compile-time!) constructs a minimal traversal of the data structure to find a match. The only way to do this in a language without macros is to write your own compiler.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#6I mean, yes, the biggest win of lisp over other languages is that the metalanguage is the language. That is what is special about lisp. That is, when defining a macro, you are simply treating the program itself as data. Since code and data take the same form, this is a really natural way to metaprogram. In most other languages, it is... not.
Now, the featured article picks a... not very good example, for this feature of the language. But that doesn't mean that metaprogramming is useless. Much of a (big) lisp program is building up a domain specific language out of macros, then solving the problem at hand with it. This is the biggest power of lisp, and also the biggest weakness--every lisp program is written in a different language.
In lisp you express your problem in macros, and then express your solution in the language you've built up.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#7Really like this counterpoint after all the LISP elitists so often snub other langs. The Ruby version is much more elegant and readable, in this little example. Would love to see more comparisons, specifically hacking around the lack of macros in other langs.
Being a Lisp enthousiast myself I often find those LISP elitists are people new to the language repeating the tired arguments we have heard so often before.
I'm learning clojure, and find it has a certain elegance, but I don't fully "get it" yet.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#8> In Lisp I get a feeling that nothing was done since '58.
Well, macros for one didn't exist in Lisp in 1958.
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#9[deleted]
Re: What's Special About Lisp?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a Lisp enthousiast myself I often find those LISP elitists are people new to the language repeating the tired arguments we have heard so often before.
I'm learning clojure, and find it has a certain elegance, but I don't fully "get it" yet.
Both lisp(s) and smalltalk took me about 18 months of decently serious use before I had a 'I get it moment'. Stick with it and it will come.
I'm hoping that if I keep at it with Haskell, that eventually I'll have my 'I get it' moment with it as I think I can learn a ton from when I get it, much like I did with Lisp and Smalltalk.
I've learned things from many different languages but the two I've learned the most from where Lisp and Smalltalk.