Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The biggest secret to Lisp is that it is actually the simplest programming language ever created—and that, coupled with its expressiveness and elegance, is why it is favored exclusively by the best programmers in the world. But is it?
Sounds like you just got told you're not one of the best programmers in the world and are still in shock about it.
Learn Lisp the Hard Way
41–50 of 144 posts
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find your argument to be very compelling. Let me guess: you learned imperative programming first, you're most familiar with it, and you only have limited experience with Lisp, if any? The fact that you find imperative programming easy (because you know it well) and Lisp and functional programming to be hard, is not very informative about which of imperative or Lispy or functional programming is easiest to lea…
The only thing that was hard with imperative programming that I can remember was "=". That was absurd, to put it simply. "x = x + 1"? As someone who has seen these symbols in math class and think they know what they mean that notation kind of suck.
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#43Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
totally unparsable Completely and utterly false. Lisp's s-expression syntax is trivial to parse because it is so regular. The thing with imperative programming Common Lisp is multi-paradigm, as mentioned in the site's FAQ. You can write imperative code all you want.
Parsable for humans, I believe he meant. And there's something nice about line-by-line execution.
For example, IME delving into the codebase of hunchentoot was way easier than django's.
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#45"Is Lisp as hard as people say it is? No. Lisp is actually the simplest programming language, and has no syntactic cruft. While it wasn't designed to be “easy to learn” like Swift, Python, Ruby, or Basic, there is less overall to learn and you will be writing real, useful programs in Lisp sooner than you could with other languages." It's like a never-ending stream of lies, every word being a little more absurd than t…
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#46I'm surprised there is no mention of Lispbox[0], by far the easiest way to set up Common Lisp. [0] http://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#47" that Lisp is not already the de-facto programming language is just a reflection of the state of the world as a whole—only a very small percentage of the population are excited for the technological singularity, but the singularity is coming no matter how much people complain. " As a transhumanist myself I resent the arrogance that led to this ridiculous appropriation. Yes, Lisp is pretty great, but the use of other…
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#48I stumbled into Lisp some fourteen years ago when a hard copy of the book landed my way.
The book is now freely available in electronic form (and has been for years): http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~shapiro/Commonlisp/
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#49"Is Lisp as hard as people say it is? No. Lisp is actually the simplest programming language, and has no syntactic cruft. While it wasn't designed to be “easy to learn” like Swift, Python, Ruby, or Basic, there is less overall to learn and you will be writing real, useful programs in Lisp sooner than you could with other languages." It's like a never-ending stream of lies, every word being a little more absurd than t…
Just because Lisp looks foreign doesn't mean that it's harder. The syntax is different , but it is also very simple . If this were untrue, Scheme wouldn't have survived as a teaching language all these years.
(format t "~{~@(~A~)~^ ~}, because ~{~A~^ ~} is easier!" llthw (cddr llthw))