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I find in certain cases that I'm looking across the power spectrum from the Lisp point of view. I recently ported some code from Haskell to Clojure and occasion
by Zak 17y ago
I find in certain cases that I'm looking across the power spectrum from the Lisp point of view. I recently ported some code from Haskell to Clojure and occasionally found myself missing Haskell's amazingly expressive type system. Trying to give Lisp such a type system would make a lot of things that are currently easy in Lisp hard or impossible.
There are certain kinds of mutually exclusive features that make certain kinds of problems easier or harder. Examples that come to mind are mutability vs immutability and static typing vs dynamic. Most of the things I sometimes find lacking in the Lisps I'm familiar with are of this sort.
- silentbicycle 17y ago> There are certain kinds of mutually exclusive features that make certain kinds of problems easier or harder. Right. The fundamental problem with the whole "blub" argument is that there isn't one linear continuum of language power. There are problems for which Erlang's supervision hierarchy and distribution primitives or Prolog's backtracking are a killer feature. This doesn't mean they're "More Powerful than Lisp", just better suited to certain kinds of problems because they committed to some very specific trade-offs. But, these same trade-offs have far-reaching implications for the language semantics, so you can't just use macros to graft them on after the fact. You can embed a mini-Prolog in Lisp, sure, but adding fully native logic variables (as in Prolog or Oz) would be far from trivial.