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Why Lisp is the most productive programming language [video]
- lispm 4y agoNice talk, but these claims are usually overselling.
- abrax3141 4y agoUh. No. No one seriously works that way. It would be a mess for anything even vaguely complex. Been doing serious lisp for 40+ years and that mode is okay for testing little things out, or teaching.
- kazinator 4y agoI'd say it's more than just for testing little things out. If there is a lot of state in the application that takes minutes to prepare, or if some bug situation has been reproduced that is difficult to get into that state, it's useful to be able to try things, including a complete bugfix. But nobody in their right mind just types code into a REPL, not recorded in a file, performs manual testing on it, and ships an image. Lisp people are sane, and put things in files like everyone else, under version control such as Git. And write unit tests and all the rest of it.
- abrax3141 4y agoThere have been various languages where this was the only mode. Early BASICS, for example, on time sharing systems, and APL. We used to push our BASIC programs to paper tape. And the APL (which was an otherwise extremely great language!) was a disaster. Originally, working in what they called “workspaces” was the only available mode of operation. The workspaces would get all messed up very quickly and you had to pull your code function-by-function into a new one to clean out APL droppings!
- abrax3141 4y agoIMHO, the reason Lisp is so productive (cf 40+ years in Lisp, and nearly every other language!) is functional style married with a builtin and naturally integrated graphdb. And as everyone eventually (re)discovered, every complex application needs a graphdb, and functional style makes coding seem like writing in a natural language. So lisp is the closest programming language to the way you think.