To me the 'idea of lisp' is strongly connected to the ideas of programming
expressed so well in "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
by Abelson and Sussman. There's lot's of great ideas in there but to me the
most notable one is that all programming is (or should be) language creation
and software engineering is largely about building layered systems of those
languages.
Lisp is particularly well suited to this way of thinking about programming
because its rich abstraction mechanisms, including syntactic abstraction
(I.e. macros) make it reasonably possible to create new languages that still
look like Lisp and can be processed by the same tools and IDEs that
understand Lisp.
Of course, readers of this mailing list know that this way of thinking about
programming and languages that support it is not exclusive to Lisp but I
think that Lisp was one of the first major-ish programming languages to make
it so central and widespread in itts community of users.
Anyway, that's my notion of the 'idea of Lisp'.
-Mark
On Aug 18, 2011 10:43 AM, "BGB" <cr88...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/18/2011 8:03 AM, Monty Zukowski wrote:
>> The Little Lisper is one of my favorite computer books. I think it
>> teaches the idea of Lisp, though without expounding on it.
>
> I mean, I am basically familiar with both Lisp and Scheme, but the way
> the statement was written implied there was some specific "idea of Lisp"
> which was separate from the language itself, which was confusing (I was
> not sure what this "idea" was in reference to exactly).
>
> or, stated another way, the original statement confused me somewhat.
>
>
> I would have personally found a statement like, for example, "the idea
> of Lisp having cons cells composed of a pair of members named car and
> cdr with car being understood as referencing the current element and cdr
> being understood as referencing the next cons cell in the list or to a
> terminating symbol or EOL and being understood to represent a list of
> items." to be a little more obvious.
>
> although, from experiences with others, I suspect my way of thinking
> about things may not be the same as everyone elses', and it is possibly
> the case that a lot of what I write is similarly non-obvious.
>
> for example, some people also accuse my writing style as being overly
> verbose and/or nonsensical, when often this is me trying to make sure to
> express enough details to where any relevant context/... is not absent.
>
>
> (just saw Alan's comment. yes, this clarifies things somewhat.)
>
>
>> Monty
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:33 AM, BGB<cr88...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 8/17/2011 6:41 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
>>>
>>> Take a look at Landin's papers and especially ISWIM ("The next 700
>>> programming languages")
>>> You don't so much want to learn Lisp as to learn "the idea of Lisp"
>>>
>>> now, I am wondering some what is exactly "the idea of Lisp"?
>>>
>>> putting the phrase into Google doesn't seem to turn up many obvious
>>> candidates.
>>>
>>> a guess: only a few syntax elements and types can represent a large
variety
>>> of stuff (like, the world can be built up from a reasonably simple
core).
>>>
>>> tried to make other guesses, but none really seem to stick.
>>>
>>> maybe also "code is data" and a few other things.
>>>
>>>
>>> (sorry, I tend to be a bit literal-minded and am not always so good at
>>> figuring out things like this).
>>>
>>> actually, it is sort of like the task of trying to write out a spec for
a
>>> high-level overview of my object system and core typesystem and
semantics.
>>> one has a sense of what it is, but trying to effectively explain it is
>>> difficult. basic idea: class-instance + dynamic extension + delegation +
>>> scopes-are-objects + ...
>>>
>>> sorry, I don't mean to make my stuff seem overly important, even if I am
>>> prone to write about it a lot.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Alan
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: karl ramberg<karlramb...@gmail.com>
>>> To: Fundamentals of New Computing<fonc@vpri.org>
>>> Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2011 12:00 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [fonc] Extending object oriented programming in Smalltalk
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>> Just reading a Lisp book my self.
>>> Lisp seems to be very pure at the bottom level.
>>> The nesting in parentheses are hard to read and comprehend / debug.
>>> Things get not so pretty when all sorts of DSL are made to make it more
>>> powerful.
>>> The REPL give it a kind of wing clipped aura; there is more to computing
>>> than text io
>>> Karl
>>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 8:00 PM, DeNigris Sean<s...@clipperadams.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Alan,
>>> While we're on the subject, you finally got to me and I started learning
>>> LISP, but I'm finding an entire world, rather than a cohesive language
or
>>> philosophy (Scheme - which itself has many variants, Common LISP, etc).
What
>>> would you recommend to "get it" in the way that changes your thinking?
What
>>> should I be reading, downloading, coding, etc.
>>> Thanks.
>>> Sean DeNigris
>>>
>>> You wouldn't say that "Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual" is outdated would
you?
>>> :-)
>>>
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>>>
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>>>
>>>
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