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If that's the difference, why would anyone care about using lisp? The examples you've chosen are nothing more than "parens before the statement instead of squig

by RogerL 5y ago

If that's the difference, why would anyone care about using lisp? The examples you've chosen are nothing more than "parens before the statement instead of squiggles after", more or less. Why would anyone advocate for lisp if that was the difference. I'm not a lisper, so that's an honest question. I can't believe people are so evangelical about the language over such a trite difference from C/Python/Java.

vindarel 5y ago
Workflow wise, that's my answer: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/
- kagevf 5y ago
  I read this earlier ... that tip about hitting "v" in the debugger was so useful!
reikonomusha 5y ago
A language is much, much more than syntax. I showed some trivial syntax, but I didn’t talk about how fast it might be to execute that code, nor easy or hard it might be to debug it, how straightforward it is to pull in a dependency, etc. You’re right, there’s little that can be inferred from such a simple code example, except one thing: the syntax really isn’t that hard to grok. With that said, to throw a bone, for me, Lisp is valuable because it’s an incrementally and interactively developed language that makes available syntactic extension to the programmer. This makes it possible to be extraordinarily productive as a programmer on even the most difficult technical challenges. Incremental and interactive: there is no edit-compile-run cycle. Feedback is instantaneous. Debugging is extremely fast. Concentration rarely falters. Syntactic extension: One can author new syntax that fits problem domains. If I’m writing a lot of RESTy APIs, I might make a nice syntax for them that makes the route and consequent action front-and-center with no boilerplate. There’s so much more than just these though. Common Lisp implementations are incredible stable and mature, there’s a huge library ecosystem, it’s possible to write code as fast as C, and the language has stood the test of several decades of time.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  That's the issue parent was raising I believe. You cannot answer a question about complex aspect of a thing by showing the simple parts.

by RogerL 5y ago

vindarel 5y ago

Workflow wise, that's my answer: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/ https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/

kagevf 5y ago
I read this earlier ... that tip about hitting "v" in the debugger was so useful!

reikonomusha 5y ago

A language is much, much more than syntax. I showed some trivial syntax, but I didn’t talk about how fast it might be to execute that code, nor easy or hard it might be to debug it, how straightforward it is to pull in a dependency, etc. You’re right, there’s little that can be inferred from such a simple code example, except one thing: the syntax really isn’t that hard to grok. With that said, to throw a bone, for me, Lisp is valuable because it’s an incrementally and interactively developed language that makes available syntactic extension to the programmer. This makes it possible to be extraordinarily productive as a programmer on even the most difficult technical challenges. Incremental and interactive: there is no edit-compile-run cycle. Feedback is instantaneous. Debugging is extremely fast. Concentration rarely falters. Syntactic extension: One can author new syntax that fits problem domains. If I’m writing a lot of RESTy APIs, I might make a nice syntax for them that makes the route and consequent action front-and-center with no boilerplate. There’s so much more than just these though. Common Lisp implementations are incredible stable and mature, there’s a huge library ecosystem, it’s possible to write code as fast as C, and the language has stood the test of several decades of time.

agumonkey 5y ago
That's the issue parent was raising I believe. You cannot answer a question about complex aspect of a thing by showing the simple parts.