unpop-opinion

4 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by unpop-opinion 10y ago

   > Because first-class functions aren't “code as data”. When you have a first-class function, the only thing you can do with it is call it. If it were a data structure, you could analyze its constituent parts. There are lots of ways
2. 2.▲
   by unpop-opinion 10y ago

   > What I mean by “code in an object language is data in the metalanguage” is that, in the metalanguage in which you're writing a compiler or interpreter, the object language program that you're processing is represented as a da
3. 3.▲
   by unpop-opinion 10y ago

   Well, the key part is gracefully . Lots of languages can manipulate code as data, but so for for me only in homoiconic languages does it end up feeling graceful for a while (although as I noted, it stops feeling graceful pretty quickly).
4. 4.▲
   by unpop-opinion 10y ago

   > You should check out Racket's macro system. It's a lot more sophisticated than Common Lisp's. Common Lisp macros are to C (e.g., gensym is a macro-level malloc, you need to manually destructure S-expressions, etc.) as Ra
5. 5.▲
   by unpop-opinion 10y ago

   Okay, I've spent a lot of time writing Common Lisp and even more time reading about Common Lisp, and to be honest, I'm just a little tired of the cult around it. People who know it well gloat about how great Common Lisp is, which