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Meh, I agree with the parent you're responding to. Calling these toys Lisp just leads to more ignorance in the general public. "Oh, Lisp is so small and elegant

Meh, I agree with the parent you're responding to. Calling these toys Lisp just leads to more ignorance in the general public. "Oh, Lisp is so small and elegant" and "Lisp is totally impractical because it's so small" are just blatantly incorrect for any "industrial strength" Lisp produced in the past 40 years. Whether Scheme is a Lisp or not is also an internal debate. Not that it matters much, Scheme is a nice base. JMC's first Lisp paper had goto in it[0] and was described in terms of the hardware it ran on, is this part of the compact and elegant formalism which you are thinking of? If you want a compact and elegant formalism then grab the untyped lambda calculus. If you want a Lisp, then at least make something with a GC and macro system. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130319041509/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/node4.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130319041509/http://www-formal...

fsloth 5y ago
I think we have two schools of thought here. The first appreciates lisp as a formalism, and the second as an industrial strength language. I don't see why the other would invalidate the other. Tiny lisp interpreters cherish Lisp as a small formalism that for some people help understand computing on a deeper theoretical level. It can also be jury rigged on top of any substrate to implement various ad-hoc systems (Greenspuns tenth rule very much applies here). The fact that we use Lisp in Greenspun 10th form or as a syntax to think about programs does not mean it would be nice to have Lisp production systems. I don't see how small lisp interpreters would be offensive to anyone. They are pure joy in my opinion, expressing neatly how a topic that sound fairly complex (interpreters) is actually expressible in elegant and succint form. On public: "more ignorance in the general public" I don't know how much public sentiment matters in deep professional fields. I don't need to know how neurosurgeons think about their craft - why should a neurosurgeon know what Lisp is? SICP is such a legendary book that it should hold Lisp's flag high enough in my opinion.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I kind of agree with you, but then again, that is why Scheme exists. So at very least it would be helpful to make a distiction between those two parentheses views of the world.

fsloth 5y ago

I think we have two schools of thought here. The first appreciates lisp as a formalism, and the second as an industrial strength language. I don't see why the other would invalidate the other. Tiny lisp interpreters cherish Lisp as a small formalism that for some people help understand computing on a deeper theoretical level. It can also be jury rigged on top of any substrate to implement various ad-hoc systems (Greenspuns tenth rule very much applies here). The fact that we use Lisp in Greenspun 10th form or as a syntax to think about programs does not mean it would be nice to have Lisp production systems. I don't see how small lisp interpreters would be offensive to anyone. They are pure joy in my opinion, expressing neatly how a topic that sound fairly complex (interpreters) is actually expressible in elegant and succint form. On public: "more ignorance in the general public" I don't know how much public sentiment matters in deep professional fields. I don't need to know how neurosurgeons think about their craft - why should a neurosurgeon know what Lisp is? SICP is such a legendary book that it should hold Lisp's flag high enough in my opinion.

pjmlp 5y ago
I kind of agree with you, but then again, that is why Scheme exists. So at very least it would be helpful to make a distiction between those two parentheses views of the world.