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I've been studying various Lisps as a hobby. I've been around a long time and I've never seen a community so touchy about something as having Lisp in the name a

I've been studying various Lisps as a hobby. I've been around a long time and I've never seen a community so touchy about something as having Lisp in the name and not being quite a Lisp. The scorn is real. newLisp has been called a garbage lisp for example that no one in their right mind would use. tldr; Go ahead and use S-Expression syntax but don't put "lisp" in the name. Rich Hickey knew this when he made Clojure.

chubot 6y ago
Reminds me of the femtolisp README :) Almost everybody has their own lisp implementation. Some programmers' dogs and cats probably have their own lisp implementations as well. This is great, but too often I see people omit some of the obscure but critical features that make lisp uniquely wonderful. These include read macros like #. and backreferences, gensyms, and properly escaped symbol names. If you're going to waste everybody's time with yet another lisp, at least do it right damnit. https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp
- boxmonster 6y ago
  I just finished wasting 2 hours of my life trying to get femtolisp to build on Windows10. It built on Ubuntu20 just fine. It was missing a bunch of stuff that should have never been missing. Oh well, it was just a curiosity.
  - ChrisRackauckas 6y ago
    julia --lisp IIRC. It's part of the Julia parser so a working version is in every Julia installation.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Comments like that make me sad. They illustrate that phenomenon where zealots often have these curious blind spots in their understanding of the focus of their zeal. For example, I would personally not consider macros (let alone reader macros or gensym) to be something that a language must have in order to be called a lisp. Such an opinion implies that the first true lisp was not introduced until a 15 years after the first language that called itself lisp, and tacitly casts McCarthy himself as one of those hapless poseurs who tried to pass an unconvincing lisp wannabe as the real deal. (At least according to the timeline given in Steele and Gabriel's history of lisp. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf) Getting twitchy about the syntax also seems somewhat odd to me, considering that Lisp 1.5 did things like cons (x (y)) => (x y)
  - boxmonster 6y ago
    The person who made this comment, Jeff Bezanson, went on to create the Julia language, so I don't mind that he's opinionated
  - chubot 6y ago
    I left out some context in the README. It's opinionated, but it's also sort of a self-deprecating joke, i.e. "why am I writing another Lisp"
    - ethagnawl 6y ago
      Yeah, that's a pretty important bit of context!

chubot 6y ago

Reminds me of the femtolisp README :) Almost everybody has their own lisp implementation. Some programmers' dogs and cats probably have their own lisp implementations as well. This is great, but too often I see people omit some of the obscure but critical features that make lisp uniquely wonderful. These include read macros like #. and backreferences, gensyms, and properly escaped symbol names. If you're going to waste everybody's time with yet another lisp, at least do it right damnit. https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

boxmonster 6y ago
I just finished wasting 2 hours of my life trying to get femtolisp to build on Windows10. It built on Ubuntu20 just fine. It was missing a bunch of stuff that should have never been missing. Oh well, it was just a curiosity.
- ChrisRackauckas 6y ago
  julia --lisp IIRC. It's part of the Julia parser so a working version is in every Julia installation.
mumblemumble 6y ago
Comments like that make me sad. They illustrate that phenomenon where zealots often have these curious blind spots in their understanding of the focus of their zeal. For example, I would personally not consider macros (let alone reader macros or gensym) to be something that a language must have in order to be called a lisp. Such an opinion implies that the first true lisp was not introduced until a 15 years after the first language that called itself lisp, and tacitly casts McCarthy himself as one of those hapless poseurs who tried to pass an unconvincing lisp wannabe as the real deal. (At least according to the timeline given in Steele and Gabriel's history of lisp. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf) Getting twitchy about the syntax also seems somewhat odd to me, considering that Lisp 1.5 did things like cons (x (y)) => (x y)
- boxmonster 6y ago
  The person who made this comment, Jeff Bezanson, went on to create the Julia language, so I don't mind that he's opinionated
- chubot 6y ago
  I left out some context in the README. It's opinionated, but it's also sort of a self-deprecating joke, i.e. "why am I writing another Lisp"
  - ethagnawl 6y ago
    Yeah, that's a pretty important bit of context!