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Second tthis. The term Lisp in CS is like Romance in linguistics, it indicates a family of languages that belong to different similar but not identical cultures
by gkya 10y ago
Second tthis. The term Lisp in CS is like Romance in linguistics, it indicates a family of languages that belong to different similar but not identical cultures which contribute to them and yet still the languages come from a common ancestor and are more similar than not while at times not easily mutually comprehensible.
- lispm 10y agoPeople who can speak German dialects can understand each other. Books written in some form of German can be understood by most readers. Same for English dialects. For Germanic languages this is not the case. English and German are both Germanic, but knowing German does not let me read English literature. Lisp is like English: a basic vocabulary, a basic syntax, basic semantics understood by all readers. I can look at some basic Lisp code and I will understand the program. A Lisp developer looking at Clojure code will understand very very little.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoReally? It's pretty easy to get, with a few pointers here and there.
- lispm 10y agoGood luck reading Thomas Mann or Hermann Hesse in German... Any modern fiction. No chance.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agorolls eyes Not German, Clojure. Clojure is pretty easy.
- lispm 10y agoReally? You must be really good at Clojure. Then you can explain this: user=> (list 1 2 3) (1 2 3) user=> (list? (list 1 2 3)) true so (1 2 3) is a list. user=> (cons 0 (list 1 2 3)) (0 1 2 3) user=> (list? (cons 0 (list 1 2 3))) false (0 1 2 3) is not a list? user=> (list? '(0 1 2 3)) true But then it is??? WTF? Compare ELISP: ELISP> (listp (list 1 2 3)) t ELISP> (listp (cons 0 (list 1 2 3))) t and CL: CL-USER> (listp (list 1 2 3)) T CL-USER> (listp (cons 0 (list 1 2 3))) T
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThat's pretty screwed up, but having brain-damged function naming doesn't mean it's not lisp. And a few odd corners does not illegability make.
- kazinator 10y agoTry TXR Lisp; you will be charmed. http://www.nongnu.org/txr http://www.nongnu.org/txr
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThanks kaz, but I've already got the manpage bookmarked. I haven't looked at it in-depth yet, but it seems to be awk, but better, which is pretty awesome.
- kazinator 10y agoYou can also completely ignore the "awk-but-different" TXR pattern-based extraction language, and just use it as a Lisp, too. The REPL is nothing but Lisp, and code stored in ".tl" files is treated as Lisp. TXR Lisp is designed to be a nice Lisp dialect on its own, not to just fill in the gaps in another language.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, yeah, but why have one awesome thing when you can have two? I have to finish reading the docs, so I know how it works, though.
- gkya 10y agoEnglish is such an oddball in the Germanic family that I'd count it an outlier. About 40% of its vocabulary is of Latin origin, and in sum about 60% of its vocabulary is made up of loan words. A couple years ago I submitted the "Uncleftish Behaviour" here [1], which demonstrates English with only germanic words. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549 For the rest of the family, there's a lot of mutual intelligibility. And, a metaphor is a metaphor, no metaphor holds if you dig deep enough. > A Lisp developer looking at Clojure code will understand very very little. This is an assumption, not a fact. Java interop code and (recur) are a bit confusing in the first sight, but not undecipherable. The prog lang that's most like English is C++: too many things are overtly overloaded, see phrasal verbs.
- lispm 10y agoClojure borrows from C++, C#, Common Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Mathematica, ML, Prolog, Scheme, Java, Racket, Ruby - according to Wikipedia. I would guess that 10% of its operator names come from Lisp. Okay, that's a wild guess. Let's look at the special forms: def-, if+, do-, let+, quote+, var-, fn-, loop-, recur-, throw-, try-, monitor-enter-, monitor-exit, ... Around three from thirteen special forms have roughly the same name/meaning in Lisp. Let's look at printing: pr-, prn-, print-, println-, newline-. None Lisp names, either they don't exist in Lisp under that name or they do something else. PR and PRN don't exist in Lisp. PRINT prints a newline before printing the object. PRINTLN does not exist in Lisp. NEWLINE is called TERPRI. Thus even for a simple thing as basic IO the API is different.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoSmall differences in IO are usually simple to deal with, and quite common between other lisps, such as Scheme, and picolisp.