Kenny Tilton just wrote a great article that I think cuts through a lot of the clutter that gets spoken about Lisp. Among the great quotes in the article, he says:
“The first reason you should be using Lisp is a non-reason, an answer to an objection, a negation, a let-down: Lisp is just an ordinary programming language.”
and
“Lisp at one level of understanding is just a normal high level programming language. Those parentheses look quite different but constitute only a superficial difference from the conventional chicken scratch syntax of semi-colons, braces, full stops, and brackets. When a conventional programmer sits down to program Lisp, they feel quickly at home: Lisp is just another 3GL.”
“I feel terrible about this. I am supposed to be up on a soapbox preaching eternal salvation and ecstasies glorious and unknown”.
I couldn’t agree more. While I haven’t officially taken the Road to Lisp survey, I will say that I started out by reading Paul Graham’s essays, which sparked my interest but didn’t convince me to ask. Paul is an honest, straightforward, persuasive writer, but in a world where everything is overhyped and “The Greatest, Most Extremest X EVER!!!!!!” I looked for some more confirmation before taking him at his word. Well, I found it. Not in any specific place, but in the sum of a year of experience reading reviews, comments, history, blogs, and books, and doing some programming of my own. And the answer I came up was that Lisp is simply a great general purpose language. And since everyone else has the same wariness about any “Most Extremest EVER!!!!”, I think Kenny can close sum it up better:
“Lispers are accused of religious fanaticism and zealotry — nope, our enthusiasm is all about getting applications built faster with less pain.”
Amen.
I’ve noticed the same thing. Lisp isn’t the best thing since sliced bread or the neo-mouse trap. It is sliced bread and the original mouse trap. It does it’s job and gets out of the way.
It’s like my granddad. He didn’t have a college degree or other titles. He wasn’t fancy but if you needed someone to fix anything, and I mean anything, he was your guy.
I was reading a book recently that admitted that Lisp had a complex syntax. I thought that was strange since I think it’s pretty simple.
Yeah, I always think it’s funny when people complain about how complex CL syntax is. Compared to C, C++, Pascal, C#, Java, or Ruby, it’s a piece of cake! Just different.
There are many people who use Lisp, with many different goals. For Kenny Tilton, maybe it’s simply the most productive language he’s found. That’s cool. More power to him. But it’s not my reason for liking Lisp.
I like Lisp because it caused me to change how I think about writing programs. I read Lisp books for the same reason I read math books. While I respect your approach, I think Dijkstra’s appeals to me more: “[Lisp] has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts”.
A good test: if Slug had never put Lisp on real hardware, would you still like it? I sure would!
I’m working on a presentation/paper about what makes Lisp interesting and different. What is it about Lisp that makes it Lisp? For example, is Scheme Lisp? Is Ruby Lisp? Of course not literally, but what are the key elements they have in common and the key differences, the ones that really matter?
It’s hard to articulate all this, so I’m working on it slowly. I hope to present it at next year’s International Lisp Conference (which will be at MIT, probably in late March 2009).
When people complain about Lisp syntax, I do two things: roll on the floor laughing and ignore them!
Simply because if one cannot figure that Lisp has NO syntax, how can he learn Lisp?