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Lisp is by far the most powerful programming language out there. In fact, Lisp is not a language, it is more a philosophy: - If a language's syntax is written
by flavio81 9y ago
Lisp is by far the most powerful programming language out there. In fact, Lisp is not a language, it is more a philosophy:
- If a language's syntax is written using an structure that the language itself can easily manipulate,
- in such a way that the source code can generate new source code, using the full power of the language (no restrictions),
- in a easy-to-program, straightforward way,
... then you practically have a Lisp language.
As somebody important said: "Lisp is the programmable programming language". This is the key difference among the rest of the languages.
I have spent about 26 years programming and only this year I set myself to grok Common Lisp. The power of Common Lisp, and in particular its object system (CLOS) makes languages like Java seem like ugly toys for miserable people.
- johnfn 9y agoI understand that lisp has power but I remain unconvinced that power in any way correlates to writing better programs. A lot of the utility that e.g. static typing provides is a sort of convention of how to write code such that we can then use tools to do the mundane work of verifying that our code is accurate or refactoring it. In other words, lack of power makes code note maintainable. I don't doubt lisp is fun and easy to write, but power doesn't have much say when it comes to refactoring. That's where convention wins out. How is refactoring 10k lines of lisp?
- kazinator 9y agoRefactoring 10K Lisp is very good. Lisp compilers provide diagnostics about code; it's just those diagnostics aren't the arbiter of whether or not something gets to execute.