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...code generation (and therefore metaprogramming itself) are also not fundamentally innovations of Lisp. For example, in C++... Wait, what? Maybe I'm confuse
by narag 3y ago
...code generation (and therefore metaprogramming itself) are also not fundamentally innovations of Lisp. For example, in C++...
Wait, what?
Maybe I'm confused but doesn't innovation mean doing something not done before?
C++ and even C are more recent than Lisp, they can't be used as counterexamples. Or am I missing something?
(Edit> other than that, I forgot to say: nice article.)
- dmvdoug 3y agoI think it’s actually a problem throughout most of the article. But I think we can get the point of what the author means: certain programming language features that have enduring impact rose to because they were in Lisp (and Lisp had a period of real prominence). So, they’re not strictly speaking innovations of Lisp, but Lisp d was responsible, as a matter of historical fact(ish), for them becoming more widespread. I say “(ish)” because I very much suspect that if you did actual careful historical investigation of the sources, you would find that there’s vanishingly less genuine creation ex nihilo with computers than the standard stories say. Features or ideas that later become prominent, typically seem to be “in the air” or inchoate when the person or people we give credit to for creating them “created” them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]