[ale] Why LISP? (was Why Ruby?)

John P. Healey jpheale at LearnLink.Emory.Edu
Thu Jan 27 01:22:59 EST 2005


I think the main thing I like about Lisp is that it's absolutely nothing like
perl, smalltalk, c, python, or java.  Whenever I sit down to try and write
something in lisp the way i would normally write it in {insert language here},
i find that lisp manages to accurately embody my ideas in the jumbled mess of
thought that they truly are.  At that point, I usually throw away whatever i've
written and rewrite a working copy in a tenth of the amount of code, simply by
abstracting it properly with macros.

no language makes me feel like a complete idiot the way lisp does, and this is
probably it's most redeeming value.

Other redeeming values:
-It doesn't overwhelm me with a bunch of meaningless syntactical symbols (this
also speeds up compilation, as it doesn't waste time trying to parse everything
into a tree)
-It has unparalleled lexical scoping abilities
-It will never wane in popularity (as it will probably never be popular)
-There's no profit in writing books about lisp and so the few books about it
are really amazing
-It was one of the first languages to support object-oriented programming, it
does so without a lot of kludgy syntax, and OOP in lisp is almost never useful
as objects are almost always the wrong abstraction

If I'm writing a throwaway script, i'll usually use python.  If I'm trying to
make a web interface to a database, I'll use PHP.  But for any substantial
programming task, I've yet to find any language that can match the power of
lisp.

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