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Usually people mention lisp and smalltalk in the same breath. What turned you off of lisp, especially as compared to smalltalk?
by aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
Usually people mention lisp and smalltalk in the same breath. What turned you off of lisp, especially as compared to smalltalk?
- ErikCorry 4y agoApart from being contemporaneous they have little in common. Lisp is functional, Smalltalk is object oriented.
- PaulHoule 4y agoBoth are dynamically type and have garbage collection. Both have lambdas.
- Qem 4y agoBoth run in the same context they are written in. See https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/lisp-smalltalk-and-the-power-of-symmetry-8bd96aaa0c0c https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/lisp-smalltalk-and-the-pow... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14333157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14333157
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y agoCommon Lisp is not a functional language. If anything, it’s object oriented. Generally speaking, lisps have always been multi-paradigm languages because macros let them absorb nearly any paradigm you can think of.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoNeither the list paradigm, nor functional languages generally, ever really gelled in my mind, the way, say, OO did. Algorithms expressed in functional form in LISP always seemed contorted from their natural form, to me. So, mostly I found LISP to be an awkward, "unscannable" language. I could write it, and read it, but it always felt a little like reading and writing a foreign language to me, not something in which my mind was native.
- baldfat 4y agoI am the exact opposite :) I started learning languages with Basic, Assembly and Fortran and ended up loving all things Lisp.