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My point was exactly that the allowed usage you propose, where Emacs Lisp is a Lisp and Clojure, for instance, is not, is quite ridiculous. The disallowed usag
by vincenttoups 14y ago
My point was exactly that the allowed usage you propose, where Emacs Lisp is a Lisp and Clojure, for instance, is not, is quite ridiculous. The disallowed usage, "Which Lisp should I use, Clojure or Common Lisp?" is however, not ridiculous. Your rule excludes a meaningful usage and includes a ridiculous one.
I'm not saying that Common Lisp reduces to s-expressions and syntax extension or even that "lispness" does, only that s-expressions and syntax extension are the features to which the denotation "a lisp" most frequently refers.
Incidentally, I program in Common Lisp for a living and am the author of several libraries in several lisp dialects, which, while not enjoying much use, do demonstrate a working knowledge of the language family. But thanks for imputing my qualifications.
- vseloved 14y agoI don't think, that the question "Which Lisp should I use: Clojure or Common Lisp?" is quite correct. As they are really so different in very basic concepts: mutable vs immutable, OO vs non-OO, bootstrapped vs JVM-based, and the list can go on and on. This question is of the same sort of "Should I use Lisp (I mean Common Lisp) or Python?" And it can be reduced t "Which dynamic language should I use?" Or "Should I use Lisp or Java?" - "Which memory-managed system programming language should I use?" Likewise "Should I use Lisp or Clojure?" can be reduced to "Which s-expression based language should I use?"