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When I was a kid they made us learn C and Lisp as part of Cognitive Science degree. I don't really use either language, unless you count C++. But I do feel t

When I was a kid they made us learn C and Lisp as part of Cognitive Science degree. I don't really use either language, unless you count C++. But I do feel that between those two languages you can understand two ideals really well. One is the idea of a clean symbolic expression, the other is the idea of a portable language that lets you get to the core of what the machine is really doing. Both are useful ways to think about programming.

goatlover 10y ago
Some years ago, Paul Graham wrote about there being too conceptually clean approaches to programming Languages, C and Lisp. The C family is far more popular, but the trend is to take C as your starting point, and add Lisp features to it. Gosling said that Java drug the C++ crowd halfway to Lisp.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  And many of us don't really want to go back. :)
- mypalmike 10y ago
  I wonder what aspects of Lisp he was referring to. The programming model of Java is basically C++ with garbage collection, minus a lot of stuff that makes C++ unsafe and hard to parse.
  - goatlover 10y ago
    Good question. Perhaps because Java's OOP is closer to Smalltalk than Simula? Here is the context: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg04045.html http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...