4 ms·

While julia does not have full lisp semantics, it is very close. Granted, it's not especially similar to Clojure itself. It's closer to a lisp though than almos

While julia does not have full lisp semantics, it is very close. Granted, it's not especially similar to Clojure itself. It's closer to a lisp though than almost any other relatively popular modern language that doesn't use S-expressions.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I'm very sceptical of such claims because I do not believe there is such a thing as “Lisp semantics” and that it is primarily a language of syntax. In particular, Common Lisp has many semantic features such as dynamic variables and the function–value dichotomy that do not exist in, say Scheme, or really any other commonly used programming language. And Scheme, yet again, has many rather esoteric operations, such as continuation capturing, that exists nowhere else as well. The three most popular Lisps today are C.L., Clojure, and Scheme, and I don't see these three having unified semantics at all and they are often further from each other than they are to many other languages.
- eigenspace 6y ago
  There are julia implementations of continuation capturing [1] fwiw. Broadly though, I agree that 'lisp semantics' is a very fuzzy term. I'd claim this family has several strong semantic themes despite their differences. E.g. their approach to meta programming, their approach to dynamism, lexically scoped closures, and the everything-is-a-expression rule. Julia fits all these themes (and others), though it's dynasmism is a bit more restricted than most lispy languages, and it's AST is printed differently, even if it's internally represented and manipulated the same as other lispy languages. You're probably right though that we wouldn't be tempted to group them together nowadays if it weren't for their syntactic similarities. [1] https://github.com/MikeInnes/Continuations.jl https://github.com/MikeInnes/Continuations.jl
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    Virtually every modern language has lexical closures; dynamic typing is certainly not unique; and not everything is an expression that returns values at all.
    - adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
      That last point is just wrong. Sometimes the return value is `nothing`, but that's still very much a return value.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

I'm very sceptical of such claims because I do not believe there is such a thing as “Lisp semantics” and that it is primarily a language of syntax. In particular, Common Lisp has many semantic features such as dynamic variables and the function–value dichotomy that do not exist in, say Scheme, or really any other commonly used programming language. And Scheme, yet again, has many rather esoteric operations, such as continuation capturing, that exists nowhere else as well. The three most popular Lisps today are C.L., Clojure, and Scheme, and I don't see these three having unified semantics at all and they are often further from each other than they are to many other languages.

eigenspace 6y ago
There are julia implementations of continuation capturing [1] fwiw. Broadly though, I agree that 'lisp semantics' is a very fuzzy term. I'd claim this family has several strong semantic themes despite their differences. E.g. their approach to meta programming, their approach to dynamism, lexically scoped closures, and the everything-is-a-expression rule. Julia fits all these themes (and others), though it's dynasmism is a bit more restricted than most lispy languages, and it's AST is printed differently, even if it's internally represented and manipulated the same as other lispy languages. You're probably right though that we wouldn't be tempted to group them together nowadays if it weren't for their syntactic similarities. [1] https://github.com/MikeInnes/Continuations.jl https://github.com/MikeInnes/Continuations.jl
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Virtually every modern language has lexical closures; dynamic typing is certainly not unique; and not everything is an expression that returns values at all.
  - adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
    That last point is just wrong. Sometimes the return value is `nothing`, but that's still very much a return value.