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Lisp (programming language)

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Lisp is a family of computer programming languages based on formal functional calculus. Lisp (for "List Processing Language") stores and manipulates programs in the same manner as any other data, making it well suited for "meta-programming" applications. One of the oldest "high level" programming languages (second only to Fortran), Lisp continues to be popular in the field of artificial intelligence down to the present day.

Quotes

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About Lisp

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  • Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
  • Lisp is a programmable programming language.
    • John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991.
  • SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.
    • Philip Greenspun, blog, 07-03-2005.
  • God wrote in Lisp code
    When he filled the leaves with green.
    The fractal flowers and recursive roots:
    The most lovely hack I've seen.
    • Bob Kanefsky, "Eternal Flame" [1]
  • I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were "Maxwell’s Equations of Software!"
  • LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)... Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life.
  • One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.
  • The conception of list processing as an abstraction created a new world in which designation and dynamic symbolic structure were the defining characteristics. The embedding of the early list processing systems in languages (the IPLs, LISP) is often decried as having been a barrier to the diffusion of list processing techniques throughout programming practice; but it was the vehicle that held the abstraction together.
  • Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
  • Emacs is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
  • APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.
  • Last night, I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue.
    At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me.
    (My god. It's full of "car"s.)
    The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest.
    Truly, this was the language from which the Gods wrought the universe!
    [God replies:] "No, it's not. [...] I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl."
  • 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular... Fortunately for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets remains high.
  • 1978 - John Allen in the chapter on Implications of LISP writes: "the power of high level languages is notational rather than computational". This insight is the most significant lesson that LISP teaches, and points to the possibility of going Beyond Programming in the "Age of Significance"

Comparing Lisp to other languages

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  • Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.
  • Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
  • Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.
  • C is coupled with Unix in the worse-is-better scenario, and can anyone seriously propose Lisp as the right-thing alternative? Lisp, face it, is used for advanced research and development in AI and other esoteric areas. It has weird syntax, and almost all other computer languages share a non-Lispy syntax. Syntax, folks, is religion, and Lisp is the wrong one. Lisp is used by weirdos who do weirdo science.
  • Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.
  • You can use C++ if you want with GNOME, but we don't assume that you're going to write C++. It's to a large extent based on Scheme, which is a dialect of LISP. LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers.
  • The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.
  • A notable group of exceptions to all the previous systems are Interactive LISP [...] and TRAC. Both are functionally oriented (one list, the other string), both talk to the user with one language, and both are "homoiconic" in that their internal and external representations are essentially the same. They both have the ability to dynamically create new functions which may then be elaborated at the users's pleasure. Their only great drawback is that programs written in them look like King Burniburiach's letter to the Sumerians done in Babylonian cuniform!

Lisp macros

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  • DOLIST is similar to Perl's foreach or Python's for. Java added a similar kind of loop construct with the "enhanced" for loop in Java 1.5, as part of JSR-201. Notice what a difference macros make. A Lisp programmer who notices a common pattern in their code can write a macro to give themselves a source-level abstraction of that pattern. A Java programmer who notices the same pattern has to convince Sun that this particular abstraction is worth adding to the language. Then Sun has to publish a JSR and convene an industry-wide "expert group" to hash everything out. That process--according to Sun--takes an average of 18 months. After that, the compiler writers all have to go upgrade their compilers to support the new feature. And even once the Java programmer's favorite compiler supports the new version of Java, they probably still can't use the new feature until they're allowed to break source compatibility with older versions of Java. So an annoyance that Common Lisp programmers can resolve for themselves within five minutes plagues Java programmers for years.
    • Peter Seibel (2005) Practical Common Lisp.

Attitude of Lisp programmers

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  • Common Lisp people seem to behave in a way that is akin to the Borg: they study the various new things that people do with interest and then find that it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they can use these new techniques if they think they need them.
  • If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
  • The Largest Disservice to LISP is most frequently done whenever a LISP advocate opens his/her mouth. LISP advocates have been, in my limited and biased experience, some of the most arrogant and condescending bastards in the world. (…) I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as, "LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world" and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard a Java, C++, C, Perl, or Python advocate make the same claim about their own language of choice.
    • Comment on Slashdot
    • Response: "To be fair, the Java, C++, C, Perl or Python advocate wouldn't have much of a case..."

Parentheses

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  • Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form.
  • (What the world needs (I think) is not (a Lisp (with fewer parentheses)) but (an English (with more.)))
  • These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age.
  • Some said the world should be in Perl,
    Some said in Lisp.
    Now, having given both a whirl,
    I held with those who favored Perl.
    But I fear we passed to men
    A disappointing founding myth.
    And should we write it all again,
    I'd end it with
    A close-paren.
  • Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.
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