Why Lisp is Awesome

http://atomized.org/2009/01/why-lisp-is-awesome/

by floater • 17 years ago

37 58 17 years ago

clueless1233• 17 years ago

For the longest time I've heard that "Lisp is awesome", but no reasons why and when I've asked why, the answer is usually, "you have to try it to see it"

This article is a pretty nice down to earth point by point explanation why list is so cool. My question is: is that it ? lambdas, data is code, dynamic programing.. I mean those features are cool, but could someone post some more clear examples of why lisp is awesome?

asolove• 17 years ago

See the HN-famous books "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming," and "On Lisp."

The claim is that Lisp is a language at a higher level of abstraction. You will have to study hard to be able to appreciate that level, but it cannot be explained in another way.

Imagine explaining Calculus to a high school Physics student. You're likely to get back: "But I can find the acceleration of an object by using normal algebra and subtracting its position at two different times!" Calculus is hard, its benefits are not clearly better than approximation or high school algebra until you reach a level at which you brain thinks of Calculus as fundamental and sees the old equations as merely derived, less-powerful versions.

Why would you expect a mind-expanding language to be any easier to explain?

clueless1233• 17 years ago

Dude... that is a very good analogy! point well taken.

cylinder714• 17 years ago

This isn't an enumerated list, obviously, but it piqued my interest in Lisp, among other things:

http://wiki.alu.org/RtL_Highlight_Film

jodrellblank3• 17 years ago

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-ducati.html

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

"""What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?"""

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/the-emacs-problem

clueless1233• 17 years ago

The above article (http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html) is excellent ! Thank you very much for the link.

DrJokepu2• 17 years ago

Many of these features are actually quite common in other languages. For example, C# has lambdas, functions as first class objects, closures, dynamic programming, null coalescence etc. The real power of Lisp in my opinion is not the existence of these features but the way they perfectly fit into the S-Expression syntax.

abstractbill4• 17 years ago

Right. Mainstream languages have been gradually evolving towards Lisp but until they adopt a simple uniform syntax they won't get real macros, which I think is the biggest difference between Lisp and other languages today.

DrJokepu2• 17 years ago

I believe that appreciating Lisp's minimalistic, tree-like syntax requires a very mathematical way of thinking. Many (perhaps most) developers have a different way of thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, diversity is a good thing but because of that, I don't think that the S-Expression syntax will ever become "mainstream".

sokoloff2• 17 years ago

If anyone misses Geocities or myspace, look at this site in IE. I'm not sure what exactly the point of (seemingly) intentionally making your blog site readable in FF and outrageously hard to read in IE is...

jordyhoyt• 17 years ago

Seems entirely intentional...

  <!--[if IE]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://atomized.org/wp-content/themes/atomized2/ie.css type="text/css" media="screen">
  <![endif]-->

I find it pretty hilarious, myself. The site is quite nice in firefox, but I would have immediately turned away if I were using ie. He must be making some assumptions about his readers.

ieure2• 17 years ago

I got tired of fixing layouts in IE and decided it would be more fun to break it instead.

manicolosi• 17 years ago

That's too bad. I'm stuck at work and wanted to read this.

sokoloff2• 17 years ago

That's certainly one approach.

From the outside, my interpretation of that is "I don't value my own opinion enough to make it accessible to users of other extremely common browsers."

I assume you blog because you feel like you have something to say that's worth reading. Making that content inaccessible to a very large segment of the browsers/users in the world works contrary to that. (I do sympathize with the PITA factor.)

KirinDave2• 17 years ago

I think the point is clearly, "Fuck you, Internet Explorer." It's a sentiment many on the internet share.

I've got a few places where I simply block IE with stylesheets myself.

l0stman• 17 years ago

You're not a company man, aren't you? :)

rntz• 17 years ago

This isn't why Lisp is awesome. This is why Lisp was awesome, back 50 years ago. Every single one of these features has since been adopted by mainstream scripting languages. What still sets Lisp apart is its metalinguistic capability - macros (hygienic or not).

joevandyk• 17 years ago

Why would adopting language X's features make X less awesome?

apu• 17 years ago

Because awesome is usually used in a relative sense -- something is awesome compared to other stuff.

The implicit other stuff is "everything else."

ieure2• 17 years ago

I was specifically writing about features Lisp pioneered which other languages adopted. I think it's enlightening to understand the roots and history of things, and fint it amazing that such an old language pioneered so many fundamental constructs.

Perhaps by 2059, we'll have languages with macros and regular syntax.

jodrellblank3• 17 years ago

> Perhaps by 2059, we'll have languages with macros and regular syntax.

Boo has macros ... http://boo.codehaus.org/Language+Guide (at the end, under 'advanced features'.

lispm14• 17 years ago

but in one language?

The main difference between Lisp and most other languages out there is that Lisp has been designed for computing with symbolic data.

    (+ a b)  is a Lisp expression

    '(+ a b)  is Lisp data

This enables the easy manipulation and computation with symbolic expressions that stand for Lisp programs, algebra terms, theorems, logic expressions, rules, frames, music compositions, ... and many more.

Some languages have similar capabilities that can be used easily (Prolog, Mathematica, ...). Some have it in difficult variants, where one has to deal with complex representations. Others simply represent programs as strings and not more.

d0m• 17 years ago

Instead of cond, you can use a switch.. it makes it even more succinct. I don't know why this post is rated so high thought.. it's like a copy of the preface of any scheme book.

wendroid• 17 years ago

I'm not declaring the awesomeness or otherwise of Lisp but you're a shitty C coder :)

yuan• 17 years ago

The "switch statement" in C is closer to the CASE macro[1] in Lisp.

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_case...

scott_s• 17 years ago

Nitpick: "dyanmic programming" does not meant what you think it means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming

vicaya2• 17 years ago

Risking being downmodded, I'd say Lisp is too "low level" for many common problems, which is great if your domain is parser/compiler construction/transformation/combination. I have no problem with lisp syntax (I can even tolerate C++ templates :), but it (and most general purpose languages) feels less natural for many domain specific problems than languages catering to the domains.

A DSL family based on a flexible core (with a lispish intermediate language even) might be a viable approach.

In many situations, simplicity and restrictions (constraints) in DSLs is better than flexibility and expressiveness in a general purpose language, because it can offer new possibilities for domain specific optimizations due to domain specific constraints.

Just like new notations in math led to breakthroughs in many math branches, new syntax can bring new life to software in many specific domains.

The key to such systems seems to be making DSLs easy to build and optimize using a suite of common building blocks (human (cs people) friendly intermediate languages (like lisp as opposed to VM byte codes) and libraries.)

lispm14• 17 years ago

That's why Lisp was called 'AI assembler'. Literally hundreds of higher-level languages have been implemented on top of Lisp. One of those has been integrated into Common Lisp: CLOS, a high-level object-oriented language for programming dynamic systems, with meta-programming capabilities.

vicaya2• 17 years ago

Most of these "high-level" languages are more of "extensions" (CLOS certainly feels like an extension) or alternative lispish languages than bona fide DSLs with DS constraints (that can be used for DS optimizations). The S-expression syntax feels foreign/messy in many domains.

chollida12• 17 years ago

I wasn't aware you could use const char pointers in switch statements.

switch (var) {

    case "foo":
        printf("foo block.");
        break;

    case "bar":
        printf("bar block.");
        break;

    default:
        printf("Default case")
}

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

You can't:

$ cat foo.c

    #include <stdio.h>
    main() {
        const char *foo = "bar";
        switch (foo) {
            case "foo":
                printf("foo\n");
        }
    }

$ gcc -pedantic -std=c99 foo.c -o foo

    foo.c: In function ‘main’:
    foo.c:4: error: switch quantity not an integer
    foo.c:5: error: case label does not reduce to an integer constant

chollida12• 17 years ago

Sorry to make you put in so much work.

I'm aware that you can't do this.

I guess my sarcasm didn't translate:)

Locke1689• 17 years ago

That switch statement doesn't work. You can't compare pointers(?) and string literals like that.

Why Lisp is Awesome

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