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Douglas Crockford just said that even though Javascript's syntax resembles an imperative language like C or Java, it's much more similar to a functional languag
by Shamanmuni 13y ago
Douglas Crockford just said that even though Javascript's syntax resembles an imperative language like C or Java, it's much more similar to a functional language like Lisp or Scheme. From that comment a whole myth began which states that Javascript == Scheme. That's like saying Java == C just because both are imperative. Handwavy and completely wrong.
What you should take from that assertion is "Javascript is more functional than imperative" (which is correct) and not "Javascript is lispy" (which is not).
- draegtun 13y agoMark Jason Dominus also says the same thing about Perl in his Higher Order Perl book [1][2] and goes onto show that Perl has 6 of the 7 features that Norvig describes has making Lisp different [3]. [1] http://hop.perl.plover.com http://hop.perl.plover.com [2] Perl is much more like Lisp than it is like C (from Preface) [3] ... the book "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", by Peter Norvig, includes a section titled "What Makes Lisp Different?" that describes seven features of Lisp. Perl shares six of these features; C shares none of them. These are big, important features, features like first-class functions, dynamic access to the symbol table, and automatic storage management. (also from Preface)