4 ms·

Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp (2002)

9 points by pandatigox 12y ago

DalekBaldwin 12y ago
Pascal Costanza exemplifies a lot of what I love about Lisp. It's interesting to note that not too long before this was written, he was highly opinionated about the language in a very different way: > I have participated in one of the first Feyerabend workshops, organized by Richard Gabriel, one of the main drivers behind the original Common Lisp effort. I have also read his book Patterns of Software around that time. Later we had a small discussion in the patterns discussion mailing list. He tried to promote Lisp as a language that has the "quality without a name", and I made some cursory remarks about Lisp's unnecessarily complicated syntax, just like anybody else who doesn't get it yet. > To me, the most important comment he made in that discussion was: "True, only the creatively intelligent can prosper in the Lisp world." The arrogance I perceived in that comment annoyed me so much that it made me want to learn Lisp seriously, just to prove him wrong and show him that Lisp is not as great as he thought it is. As they say, the rest is history. [http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/04/lisp-hackers-pascal-costanza.html http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/04/lisp-hackers-pasca...] Once you begin to peek under the hood of the language, there's no end to the secrets it starts revealing and no end to the intellectual rewards it brings to curious (and yes, even arrogant) newcomers. P-cos has since gone on to do some of the most interesting work in Lisp since the ANSI standardization, such as ContextL. It would be interesting to see a substantial update to this guide in light of his more recent work.
Animats 12y ago
If you're going to use LISP at this late date, go with Scheme. Common LISP is too bloated. Really, now that we have good dynamic data structures and garbage collection in most languages, LISP is obsolete. There was a time when it was the only way to do dynamic data easily. The first online web store creation system, Viamall (which became Yahoo Store) was in LISP. But we don't need to do that any more.
- Grue3 12y ago
  Use a language X. Language Y is too bloated. Really, now that we have some of the features of language Y in most languages, language Y is obsolete. There was a time when you needed to use language Y to get feature A, but it's not the case anymore. Can you see all the logical fallacies in your post yet? You criticize Lisp for being too bloated and in the very next paragraph proclaim that it had features that none of the other languages had, which necessitated its use. Well, guess what? This is still the case.

9 points by pandatigox 12y ago

Pascal Costanza exemplifies a lot of what I love about Lisp. It's interesting to note that not too long before this was written, he was highly opinionated about the language in a very different way: > I have participated in one of the first Feyerabend workshops, organized by Richard Gabriel, one of the main drivers behind the original Common Lisp effort. I have also read his book Patterns of Software around that time. Later we had a small discussion in the patterns discussion mailing list. He tried to promote Lisp as a language that has the "quality without a name", and I made some cursory remarks about Lisp's unnecessarily complicated syntax, just like anybody else who doesn't get it yet. > To me, the most important comment he made in that discussion was: "True, only the creatively intelligent can prosper in the Lisp world." The arrogance I perceived in that comment annoyed me so much that it made me want to learn Lisp seriously, just to prove him wrong and show him that Lisp is not as great as he thought it is. As they say, the rest is history. [http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/04/lisp-hackers-pascal-costanza.html http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/04/lisp-hackers-pasca...] Once you begin to peek under the hood of the language, there's no end to the secrets it starts revealing and no end to the intellectual rewards it brings to curious (and yes, even arrogant) newcomers. P-cos has since gone on to do some of the most interesting work in Lisp since the ANSI standardization, such as ContextL. It would be interesting to see a substantial update to this guide in light of his more recent work.

Animats 12y ago

If you're going to use LISP at this late date, go with Scheme. Common LISP is too bloated. Really, now that we have good dynamic data structures and garbage collection in most languages, LISP is obsolete. There was a time when it was the only way to do dynamic data easily. The first online web store creation system, Viamall (which became Yahoo Store) was in LISP. But we don't need to do that any more.

Grue3 12y ago
Use a language X. Language Y is too bloated. Really, now that we have some of the features of language Y in most languages, language Y is obsolete. There was a time when you needed to use language Y to get feature A, but it's not the case anymore. Can you see all the logical fallacies in your post yet? You criticize Lisp for being too bloated and in the very next paragraph proclaim that it had features that none of the other languages had, which necessitated its use. Well, guess what? This is still the case.