Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
joshbradley.me
Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
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Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#2The thing is that trying to understand "the power of Lisp" via the toy interpreter from The Roots of Lisp[0] is like trying to understand "the beauty of the sea" after seeing a single five-minute YouTube video explaining it.
It will give you the basic idea, but it won't tell you about macros, reader macros, compiler macros, and having the whole language always available to build your abstractions on; it won't tell you about CLOS, including multiple dispatch, metaclasses, or method combinations; it won't tell you about the condition system and programming from inside the debugger; it won't tell you about live recompilation and live coding; it won't tell you about the JVM interoperability of Clojure, Kawa, or ABCL; it won't tell you about Racket's tower-of-languages approach to programming; I can keep on going for a while. And, since most Lisp dialects and implementations are nowadays compiled, either to native code or to bytecode, the just-interpreting approach doesn't even work very well.
Articles like this are fun, but they end up completely missing the point. This isn't "the power of Lisp"; it's just the very, very, very beginning. The rabbit hole goes much deeper.
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#3While I don’t disagree with Josh’s blog, concentrating on just language features leaves out the style of Lisp development: bottom up REPL style development. When I have to use Haskell or Python, I find myself working as if I were using Lisp: I still favor the REPL and building up from primitive functions to the top level application. This is probably a bad habit but it is the way I work. BTW, using the standard Emacs support for Python works very well: load a file, then re-evaluate just changed classes and functions (not Lisp, but a good work flow anyway).
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#4The thing is that trying to understand "the power of Lisp" via the toy interpreter from The Roots of Lisp[0] is like trying to understand "the beauty of the sea" after seeing a single five-minute YouTube video explaining it. It will give you the basic idea, but it won't tell you about macros, reader macros, compiler macros, and having the whole language always available to build your abstractions on; it won't tell yo…
here's how to leverage the pretty printer to transpile lisp into pascal https://merl.com/publications/docs/TR93-17.pdf
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#5While I don’t disagree with Josh’s blog, concentrating on just language features leaves out the style of Lisp development: bottom up REPL style development. When I have to use Haskell or Python, I find myself working as if I were using Lisp: I still favor the REPL and building up from primitive functions to the top level application. This is probably a bad habit but it is the way I work. BTW, using the standard Emacs…
do you struggle with bottom-up-Haskell? I always associated Haskell with a very opinionated top-down process
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#6While I don’t disagree with Josh’s blog, concentrating on just language features leaves out the style of Lisp development: bottom up REPL style development. When I have to use Haskell or Python, I find myself working as if I were using Lisp: I still favor the REPL and building up from primitive functions to the top level application. This is probably a bad habit but it is the way I work. BTW, using the standard Emacs…
do you struggle with bottom-up-Haskell? I always associated Haskell with a very opinionated top-down process
I like Haskell, but my Haskell skills are weak. I experiment in the REPL to see what works and then write functions in an editor. Also, I like writing pure Haskell code, and when I need to do network or file access, etc., then I find appropriate code on the web that I can learn from. So, my use of Haskell is fairly simplistic. I even wrote a very short book using the small subset of Haskell that I am comfortable with and use for my own projects.
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#7The thing is that trying to understand "the power of Lisp" via the toy interpreter from The Roots of Lisp[0] is like trying to understand "the beauty of the sea" after seeing a single five-minute YouTube video explaining it. It will give you the basic idea, but it won't tell you about macros, reader macros, compiler macros, and having the whole language always available to build your abstractions on; it won't tell yo…
here's how to leverage the pretty printer to transpile lisp into pascal https://merl.com/publications/docs/TR93-17.pdf
TIL. This is cursed. Have an upvote.
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
here's how to leverage the pretty printer to transpile lisp into pascal https://merl.com/publications/docs/TR93-17.pdf
TIL. This is cursed. Have an upvote.
Hey, I didn't even realize who I was answering to. Btw there's a part 1 online too https://merl.com/publications/docs/TR91-04.pdf
Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#9Re: Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
TIL. This is cursed. Have an upvote.
Hey, I didn't even realize who I was answering to. Btw there's a part 1 online too https://merl.com/publications/docs/TR91-04.pdf
> Hey, I didn't even realize who I was answering to.
The best kind of comments are the ones which respond to the what as opposed to the who. :D