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>There is a reason lisp didn't win. We put up with it (I use emacs, so I have to write it at times) but in general it's harder to reason about transformable lis

>There is a reason lisp didn't win. We put up with it (I use emacs, so I have to write it at times) but in general it's harder to reason about transformable lists of code than it is about plain old objects and their methods. Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp. >Though I completely agree that inheritance gets clunky and I strongly favour composition. Check out CLOS (Common Lisp Object System), which is based on multimethods/multiple dispatch. It is very different to "traditional" OOP (most other languages except Julia and Dylan)

taneq 9y ago
> Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp. The lisp that didn't win is not an acceptable lisp.
- firethief 9y ago
  So we have only unacceptable lisps. That doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that Emacs Lisp is a bad unacceptable lisp to use as an example if you want to talk about the potential of the Lisp family of languages.
kamaal 9y ago
>>Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp. Emacs lisp is actually a very practical, easy to use and fun lisp to do a lot of great work in. Richard Matthew Stallman notes: It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. From: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html Of course if secretaries and regular office people with no prior exposure to programming or STEM education can program Emacs using Emacs Lisp and do useful productive stuff. Programmers most certainly can.
- erikj 9y ago
  Please do not conflate MacLisp and Emacs Lisp, they are different languages. GNU Emacs is not directly derived from Multics Emacs, it's one of the many reimplementations of the original Emacs. The closest thing to MacLisp today is actually Common Lisp, and it's much more advanced than Emacs Lisp, which is not surprising considering that Stallman was not interested in creating a state-of-the-art Lisp implementation with his limited resources but wanted to merely provide a minimal foundation for a programmable text editor.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    Thanks for mentioning this. I was just trying to point out the fact that its not hard to code in Lisp. Especially given the fact that non-programmers were doing it long back, in an era where there was nothing like Internet available to ask for help.
  - kbp 9y ago
    > The closest thing to MacLisp today is actually Common Lisp I think you could make the argument that Emacs Lisp is as close. Emacs Lisp has some major similarities with Maclisp that CL doesn't share (like in variable scoping and obarrays and such). Elisp and CL are both very close relatives of Maclisp; Elisp was designed as a mini-Maclisp for a text editor, whereas Common Lisp was designed as Maclisp's successor.

taneq 9y ago

> Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp. The lisp that didn't win is not an acceptable lisp.

firethief 9y ago
So we have only unacceptable lisps. That doesn't really have any bearing on the fact that Emacs Lisp is a bad unacceptable lisp to use as an example if you want to talk about the potential of the Lisp family of languages.

kamaal 9y ago

>>Sounds like your experience was with Emacs Lisp, a very clunky Lisp. Emacs lisp is actually a very practical, easy to use and fun lisp to do a lot of great work in. Richard Matthew Stallman notes: It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. From: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html Of course if secretaries and regular office people with no prior exposure to programming or STEM education can program Emacs using Emacs Lisp and do useful productive stuff. Programmers most certainly can.

erikj 9y ago
Please do not conflate MacLisp and Emacs Lisp, they are different languages. GNU Emacs is not directly derived from Multics Emacs, it's one of the many reimplementations of the original Emacs. The closest thing to MacLisp today is actually Common Lisp, and it's much more advanced than Emacs Lisp, which is not surprising considering that Stallman was not interested in creating a state-of-the-art Lisp implementation with his limited resources but wanted to merely provide a minimal foundation for a programmable text editor.
- kamaal 9y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this. I was just trying to point out the fact that its not hard to code in Lisp. Especially given the fact that non-programmers were doing it long back, in an era where there was nothing like Internet available to ask for help.
- kbp 9y ago
  > The closest thing to MacLisp today is actually Common Lisp I think you could make the argument that Emacs Lisp is as close. Emacs Lisp has some major similarities with Maclisp that CL doesn't share (like in variable scoping and obarrays and such). Elisp and CL are both very close relatives of Maclisp; Elisp was designed as a mini-Maclisp for a text editor, whereas Common Lisp was designed as Maclisp's successor.