Reasons To Admire Lisp (part 1) (16 Apr 2009)

Well, after all those years, I'm usually not hurt anymore. Instead, I just giggle to myself like the proverbial mad scientist. You see, in the past few years there has been such a huge surge of interest in functional and dynamic languages that everybody and their sister already programs in a Lisp-like language, only without knowing it. Or, at the very least, they use a language or programming environment whose designers adopted very significant amounts of Lispy concepts. Examples: C#, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Scheme, Groovy, Perl, Smalltalk, Java - and, in fact, pretty much any language running on top of the CLR or JVM. (Heck, even C++ programmers will soon learn lambdas and closures...)

Being an old fart, my memory doesn't serve me as well as it used to, hence my bias towards simple concepts and simple solutions which are easy to memorize.

For starters, a compelling reason to fall in love with Lisp is its syntactical simplicity. Lisp probably has the easiest syntax of all programming languages, maybe with the exception of Forth-like languages. Want proof? This morning, a good soul over at reddit pointed me to results of the University of Geneva's HyperGOS project: A comparison of BNF graphs for various languages. Lisp's BNF looks like this:

s_expression = atomic_symbol / "(" s_expression "."s_expression ")" / list 

list = "(" s_expression < s_expression > ")"

atomic_symbol = letter atom_part

atom_part = empty / letter atom_part / number atom_part

letter = "a" / "b" / " ..." / "z"

number = "1" / "2" / " ..." / "9"

empty = " "

Now compare the above to, say, Java. (And yes, the description above doesn't tell the whole story since it doesn't cover any kind of semantic aspects. So sue me.)

Oh, and while we're at it: Lisp Syntax Doesn't Suck, says Brian Carper, and who am I to disagree.

So there.

I know the feeling very well, many programmers have just a few bad memories of the weird AI language that used recursion for everything and that they learned on pen and paper together with prolog and tons of complicated algorithms.

Little nitpicking, in your example languages you mention scheme which is a member of Lisp family of languages.

-- Slobodan Blazeski - 22 Sep 2009

You're right, of course - Scheme is a Lisp, not just a language inspired by Lisp. (Had I spelt it LISP, then it'd be the language invented in the 50s, therefore being a forerunner of Scheme, whereas "Lisp" is ambiguous.)

-- ClausBrod - 22 Sep 2009