4 ms·

This article is good to get an idea what lisp is all about. http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html It compare

This article is good to get an idea what lisp is all about. http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html It compares lisp to XML. In that you are programming in a tree. Other languages must be parsed into a tree by the compiler, but with lisp you are already there from the get go. Programming in a tree is the "magic" that's unique to lisp. And it is a big deal.

jonaf 10y ago
Thanks. These gems are particularly the kind of insight I am relying on HN for!
bubblesocks 10y ago
Lisp is awesome, but I think you're doing it a disservice by comparing it to XML, which is a technology that was derived straight from Satan's bottom. Lisp is elegant. XML, not so much.
- jonaf 10y ago
  This isn't exactly relevant to the OP, but, what's wrong with XML?
- kazinator 10y ago
  It's useful to compare Lisp to XML from the data notation aspect. As in, look, we already had better ideas for tree-structured data being communicated in text, forty years before XML.