Oops,
and OT ~ Has anyone used Lisp? I've been reading Paul Graham's essays on how great Lisp is, and how Python is near to implementing features Lisp had in the 60's. Also found the concept of macros interesting.
I've dabbled a bit with Lisp in school and I read most of the Wizard book (see other posts for references). Another good book for learning the basics is "The Little Schemer".
Learning Lisp and reading the Wizard book will definitely broaden your perspective of programming languages. And using recursion will never be a problem again.
My personal opinion and preference is for Python, but that shouldn't be a surprise :-)
The rest of this post is my opinion as a Python bigot and Lisp newbie...
Lisp is kind of minimalist. It gives you a few *extremely* powerful tools, a little bit of syntax to glue it together, and lets you build whatever you want on top of that.
To me, it ended up seeming like an awful lot of work, like everything is built from scratch. Python has more syntax and less power. To me it has enough power to do what I want to do and I like the syntax.
This blog entry <http://www.genehack.org/2005/01/13#lisp-with-shitty-syntax> says of Python, "It's like they stole Lisp, and give it sh*tty syntax!" and "perhaps Python was the subset of Lisp that was understandable by C++ programmers"
To me it's not sh*tty syntax, it's usable syntax. And it is the subset of Lisp that I need to get real work done.
I've read some of Paul Graham's stuff and I'm pretty sure a Lisp bigot would tell me I just haven't learned enough Lisp to appreciate it. I'm even willing to concede that he might be right :-) but Python works for me.
This page gives a good taste of the debate... http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie
Kent
Queries -
1) Anyone here familiar with both? 2) If so, which would you rate as more powerful? 3) What's with all those parentheses? 4) Perhaps the powerful question's a bit vague, how about ease of use? I like that the simplest Lisp expression is - , but those brackets.... 5) Are you able to point me towards a simplified explanation of how the 'syntaxless' language can write programmes?
Sorry to play 20 questions.
Regards,
Liam Clarke
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