3 ms·

> C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist. It's funny because my impression is completely the oppo

by tikhonj 14y ago

> C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist. It's funny because my impression is completely the opposite: C is a very specialist language suitable for a narrow domain of low-level code. For everything else, it's just begging for rampant bugs and security issues. On the other hand, Lisp and Smalltalk (well, maybe just Lisp--I am not really familiar with Smalltalk) are very general-purpose languages. You could reasonably use them for all sorts of tasks. And you would avoid whole classes of bugs common in C. Just because many people didn't use them doesn't mean the languages weren't well-suited. Sure, they were never populist langauges, but that's ultimately of little consequence. Especially for "hackers".

ErrantX 14y ago
By specialist I mean "big learning curve". I tried learning Lisp once and felt that it was an obviously powerful language, but there were easier languages to learn that would do as good a job for general purpose needs.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  Well, I can't speak much for Common Lisp, but you couldn't be much more wrong for Scheme--Scheme is easily one of the easiest language to learn, full stop. The intro CS course at my university used to be taught in Scheme and people with literally no programming experience could get the hang of most of the language in the first couple of weeks. The only reason some people view it as difficult is that it is very different from the C-like languages they're already familiar with. Once you've learned one of those, the others are, of course, very easy to pick up. Not because the languages themselves are simple but because they're similar. Scheme, by comparison, has a very different--and much more regular--syntax and very different ways of doing things. Besides, C is relatively difficult to learn: there are a whole bunch of low-level concepts (pointer arithmetic), a large amount of syntax and a ton of edge cases and undefined behavior. Not to mention the preprocessor. It takes much more effort to get even a basic result with C than it does with another language like Scheme.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    What is difficult about programming in Lisps is the same thing that is difficult about driving 911's - doing so in the manner that experts do requires a radically different mindset. If you've seen 911's slinging oversteer around a road course and schemers...well writing scheme - it's apparent that neither thinks about driving or programming like the people against whom they are competing.
- emiljbs 14y ago
  What was hard about learning Lisp? And which Lisp?

by tikhonj 14y ago

ErrantX 14y ago

By specialist I mean "big learning curve". I tried learning Lisp once and felt that it was an obviously powerful language, but there were easier languages to learn that would do as good a job for general purpose needs.

tikhonj 14y ago
Well, I can't speak much for Common Lisp, but you couldn't be much more wrong for Scheme--Scheme is easily one of the easiest language to learn, full stop. The intro CS course at my university used to be taught in Scheme and people with literally no programming experience could get the hang of most of the language in the first couple of weeks. The only reason some people view it as difficult is that it is very different from the C-like languages they're already familiar with. Once you've learned one of those, the others are, of course, very easy to pick up. Not because the languages themselves are simple but because they're similar. Scheme, by comparison, has a very different--and much more regular--syntax and very different ways of doing things. Besides, C is relatively difficult to learn: there are a whole bunch of low-level concepts (pointer arithmetic), a large amount of syntax and a ton of edge cases and undefined behavior. Not to mention the preprocessor. It takes much more effort to get even a basic result with C than it does with another language like Scheme.
- brudgers 14y ago
  What is difficult about programming in Lisps is the same thing that is difficult about driving 911's - doing so in the manner that experts do requires a radically different mindset. If you've seen 911's slinging oversteer around a road course and schemers...well writing scheme - it's apparent that neither thinks about driving or programming like the people against whom they are competing.
emiljbs 14y ago
What was hard about learning Lisp? And which Lisp?