The Nature of Lisp (2006)

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

by b-man • 16 years ago

54 33 16 years ago

An oldie but goodie. This helped explain a lot of the often-praised features of Lisp and functional programming that had never made sense before.

mace• 16 years ago

Older post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127736

projectileboy• 16 years ago

Ditto. Thanks to the RethinkDB guys for doing these all those years ago...

eru11• 16 years ago

Yes. However keep in mind that Lisp has left the forefront of functional programming mostly to ML derived languages.

Common Lisp isn't even very functional. Not much more than e.g. Python. Scheme is a bit more functional oriented.

samatman• 16 years ago

Clojure, OTOH, is beautifully functional. Also, it is supported by NetBeans and Eclipse, so no SLIME needed.

ced• 16 years ago

> Lisp has left the forefront of functional programming mostly to ML derived languages

I'd be grateful if you could expand upon that statement. I'm a Lisper, and half the time I see one of these Haskell articles, I wonder if there really is a there there. For sure, functional programming can be a whole lot better than CL or Scheme, but I'd like to know if the difference is significant.

pchristensen2• 16 years ago

I know. The article covers both (or did I mix it in with another of coffeemug's articles?). But coming from C# 2.0, Lisp's functional-supported-but-optional was still a big jump.

DrJokepu4• 16 years ago

Commenting on the last paragraph: I honestly believe that one of the biggest obstacles for newcomers to Lisp is Emacs.

Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and it is truly the superior environment to do work in Lisp. However it has a bit of a steep learning curve just like Lisp itself and fighting two battles (one with Lisp and one with Emacs) is no easy task for someone coming from a Java / C# and Eclipse / Visual Studio background. I know because I've been there. That's why I decided to start work on an open source Visual Studio add-in to support for Common Lisp in Visual Studio itself. I think being able to do the first steps in a familiar environment would be a great help for newcomers. I wonder what you guys think of the idea?

b-man2• 16 years ago

Did you ever tried Drscheme?

DrJokepu4• 16 years ago

Yes, DrScheme is awesome. However, I was specifically thinking of supporting Common Lisp, not Scheme as Scheme already has enough friendly tools for beginners.

mahmud• 16 years ago

You want LispIDE

http://www.daansystems.com/lispide/

Hardly a substitute for Emacs/Slime, but for beginners, you can get a lot done. I use it when I am not plugged into in A/C outlet; it saves battery ;-)

DrJokepu4• 16 years ago

Yes I know LispIDE, however it is really nothing more than notepad.exe with syntax highlighting and some basic REPL integration. I think of the VS F# editor with REPL ("interactive mode" as it is called there) as an example of what I'm trying to achieve.

eru11• 16 years ago

The other way round could also work: Make people use Emacs for C first, then switch them to Common Lisp.

(However I like Scheme better anyway.)

jockc• 16 years ago

I started using emacs as a C programmer; even for C, emacs was a great environment, especially back in 1989; good integration with the compiler and cvs, auto indent, syntax highlighting, etc..

DennisP• 16 years ago

As a C# developer in my day job, I think that is a completely awesome idea.

eru11• 16 years ago

> After all, I was almost blinded by the infamous Lisp parentheses!

Lisp's parenthesis seem to share their deterrence factor with Python's significant indentation. Most people who have used one of them for a while don't even notice them any longer. At least not as a problem.

Interestingly, Haskell seems to be strange enough, that nobody fears its significant indentation.

Xurinos5• 16 years ago

If it's any consolation, I do not like its line noise. I already work with perl. I wanted to step up towards beauty.

eru11• 16 years ago

Yes, Common Lisp is somewhat ugly. Scheme looks nicer.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

Interesting. I instantly liked Python's significant whitespace. It just made sense: I was already indenting for readability, so why not make it meaningful as well and do away with curly braces and semicolons?

eru11• 16 years ago

It was the same for me. Plays nice with "Say it once and only once.".

The Nature of Lisp (2006)

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