On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 15:10 -0600, Shane Hathaway wrote: > I guess you threw in that flamebait for fun. :-) > > But I'm not looking for flamebait. In all honesty, I'd like to know > more about the "and more" part of your LISP statement. What am I > missing by not using LISP? I don't mean some random feature like > pretty-printing numbers. What deep philosophy is in LISP that other > languages have yet to discover?
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. There is no deep philosophy that I know of. But in seriousness, LISP can implement all of our paradigms including object-oriented programming. And some folks swear by it (some at it). I think that saying you should use LISP for everything is a bit like saying you should do everything in a turing machine. LISP in my mind has always been about demonstrating concepts. For example, LISP and similar languages like Scheme have always been good languages to learn about algorithms, data structures, building new languages, and so forth. Even new-fangled concepts like meta programming (dynamic programming) have been doable in LISP for years they tell me. I think the argument goes that any programming concept can be reduced to something in lisp (just balance those parens!), although you might not immediately recognize the form, nor would the LISP form necessarily be efficient. Recent versions of LISP have added syntactic sugar to wrap things like object-oriented programming, etc. > > Shane > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
