{"id":200,"date":"2008-02-27T10:39:30","date_gmt":"2008-02-27T16:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pchristensen.com\/blog\/articles\/lisp-is-great-because-its-an-ordinary-language\/"},"modified":"2008-02-27T10:39:30","modified_gmt":"2008-02-27T16:39:30","slug":"lisp-is-great-because-its-an-ordinary-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/articles\/lisp-is-great-because-its-an-ordinary-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Lisp is Great Because It’s An Ordinary Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kenny Tilton<\/a> just wrote a great article<\/a> that I think cuts through a lot of the clutter that gets spoken about Lisp. Among the great quotes in the article, he says:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

“Lisp at one level of understanding is just a normal high level programming language. Those parentheses look<\/span> 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.”<\/p>\n

“I feel terrible about this. I am supposed to be up on a soapbox preaching eternal salvation and ecstasies glorious and unknown”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I couldn’t agree more. While I haven’t officially taken the Road to Lisp<\/a> 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<\/a>. And since everyone else has the same wariness about any “Most Extremest EVER!!!!”, I think Kenny can close sum it up better:<\/p>\n

“Lispers are accused of religious fanaticism and zealotry — nope, our enthusiasm is all about getting applications built faster with less pain.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-lisp","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pazgP-3e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}