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Joel Moses has been credited with coining the phrase in the 1970s APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anythi
by snaky 11y ago
Joel Moses has been credited with coining the phrase in the 1970s
APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.
- progman 11y ago> Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp. Such claims are usually made by people who haven't discovered the power of Lisp yet. http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html
- lispm 11y agoIn this case, Joel Moses could easily know more about Lisp than we both together... probably he speaks from deep experience.
- snaky 11y agoSuch claims are usually made by people who haven't discovered the beauty of APL yet.
- progman 11y agoAPL is actually beautiful. Watch the development of Conways game of life in APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
- cema 11y agoMud can be shaped in a large number of useful and beautiful things.
- snaky 11y agoThat would be pretty difficult to make a diamond from mud. > Writing a macro that understands forks and hooks is an exercise for a beginner – if the operators covered are strictly monadic and/or dyadic as are those in J. However in Lisp all those optional auxiliary and keyword arguments immensely complicate matters. In order to make it operational within a month or so of effort a tacit macro could be implemented to work just on a subset of Lisp operators. http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10500180 http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10500180