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Actually, lisp matches all of those as well. It might not be the easiest to learn coming from C, but otherwise it's not bad.

by jbjohns 17y ago

samdk 17y ago
Lisp is significantly harder to learn for most people--especially those people who are programming only as a means to an end and not for fun. Lisp goes significantly farther towards shoving FP down your throat than Python does any individual paradigm. Lisp does not (to the best of my knowledge) have anything to match scipy/numpy. Now, this doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer if the scientific community were dominated by FP instead of Fortran and Python, but I think it's very easy for people like us to go and say "FP is easy" without realizing that for most people it's really not.
- morphir 17y ago
  No its not 'harder' to learn. You just have to understand the concept of applicative evaluation and prefix notation. Then recursion and higher-order functions. That is four things. (Macros can be considered advanced). In the end, all functions evaluates to a value. Thus functions are considered to be data. This value (data) is then passed on to the next function as arguments, and so on.. Anonymous functions is also something which kicks ass, and you miss such features when programming in C. This is one reason why C programs should be left as simple as possible, with as little abstraction as possible. (Fortran? Come on!)
  - samdk 17y ago
    Recursion is very hard for most people. Lisp is quite simple, yes, but FP is an entirely different style of programming that takes a lot of people time to learn and get used to.
- jbjohns 17y ago
  >Lisp goes significantly farther towards shoving FP down your throat than Python does any individual paradigm. This is simply not the case. It has the best OO system in existence. It has the loop macro (mini language). In actual practice I think lispers tend to not program so functionally because they're instinctively afraid of consing.

Actually, lisp matches all of those as well. It might not be the easiest to learn coming from C, but otherwise it's not bad.

by jbjohns 17y ago

Actually, lisp matches all of those as well. It might not be the easiest to learn coming from C, but otherwise it's not bad.

samdk 17y ago

Lisp is significantly harder to learn for most people--especially those people who are programming only as a means to an end and not for fun. Lisp goes significantly farther towards shoving FP down your throat than Python does any individual paradigm. Lisp does not (to the best of my knowledge) have anything to match scipy/numpy. Now, this doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer if the scientific community were dominated by FP instead of Fortran and Python, but I think it's very easy for people like us to go and say "FP is easy" without realizing that for most people it's really not.

morphir 17y ago
No its not 'harder' to learn. You just have to understand the concept of applicative evaluation and prefix notation. Then recursion and higher-order functions. That is four things. (Macros can be considered advanced). In the end, all functions evaluates to a value. Thus functions are considered to be data. This value (data) is then passed on to the next function as arguments, and so on.. Anonymous functions is also something which kicks ass, and you miss such features when programming in C. This is one reason why C programs should be left as simple as possible, with as little abstraction as possible. (Fortran? Come on!)
- samdk 17y ago
  Recursion is very hard for most people. Lisp is quite simple, yes, but FP is an entirely different style of programming that takes a lot of people time to learn and get used to.
jbjohns 17y ago
>Lisp goes significantly farther towards shoving FP down your throat than Python does any individual paradigm. This is simply not the case. It has the best OO system in existence. It has the loop macro (mini language). In actual practice I think lispers tend to not program so functionally because they're instinctively afraid of consing.