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  Lisp: It's Not About Macros, It's About Read

Note: the examples here only work with outlet lisp. Refer to your version of lisp/scheme’s documentation for how read works (and possibly other forms)I know it’s an old post by now, but something about the article Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java, part II rubbed me the wrong way. The examples just aren’t that good. The usage of macros is plain baffling, when a function would have been fine. The author admits this, but still does it. There’s a follow-up post which focuses more on macros but it still misses the point.Here’s the thing: it’s not really...

5,061 0       JAVA MACRO LISP READ


  Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java

“Common what?” is a common reply I get when I mention Common Lisp. Perhaps rightly so, since Common Lisp is not all that common these days.Developed in the sixties, it is one of the oldest programming languages out there. In its heydays it was used mostly for Artificial Intelligence research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the like, and therefore has a lingering association with AI. People not in AI shy away from Lisp. Common Lisp is a powerful and versatile programming language that can and should be used more often in other paradigms. It saddens me to see that Common L...

6,725 1       JAVA COMPARISON COMMON LISP LISP


  Common Lisp is the best language to learn programming

Now that Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp (see my review on Slashdot) has come out, I definitely think Common Lisp is the best language for kids (or anyone else) to start learning computer programming.Between Land of Lisp, David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (really great book for people new to programming, available for free) and The Little LISPer (3rd edition, editions four and up use Scheme) you have three really great resources to get started.Lisp's syntax is a great advantage because it is so simple to learn and has so few special cases. The interactiv...

5,408 0       PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE COMMON LISP KID FIRST


  The roots of Lisp

(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp-- both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple operators and a not...

3,619 0       ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI LIPS ROOT MCCARTHY