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

sponge.png

When I tell people that I like and admire Lisp, they will typically roll their eyes and/or give me some pretty weird looks - and then they'll ignore me for the rest of their lives.

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.



When asked for a TWiki account, use your own or the default TWikiGuest account.



to top

You are here: Blog > DefinePrivatePublic20090416WhyIAdmireLisp

r1.2 - 19 Apr 2009 - 18:05 - ClausBrod to top

Blog
This site
RSS

  2017: 12 - 11 - 10
  2016: 10 - 7 - 3
  2015: 11 - 10 - 9 - 4 - 1
  2014: 5
  2013: 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5
  2012: 2 - 10
  2011: 1 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 12
  2010: 11 - 10 - 9 - 4
  2009: 11 - 9 - 8 - 7 -
     6 - 5 - 4 - 3
  2008: 5 - 4 - 3 - 1
  2007: 12 - 8 - 7 - 6 -
     5 - 4 - 3 - 1
  2006: 4 - 3 - 2 - 1
  2005: 12 - 6 - 5 - 4
  2004: 12 - 11 - 10
  C++
  CoCreate Modeling
  COM & .NET
  Java
  Mac
  Lisp
  OpenSource
  Scripting
  Windows
  Stuff
Changes
Index
Search
Maintenance
Impressum
Datenschutzerklärung
Home



Jump:

Copyright © 1999-2024 by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
Ideas, requests, problems regarding TWiki? Send feedback