Comments on: Lisp is Great Because It’s An Ordinary Language

By: Deepak Surti

Deepak Surti — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:02:29 +0000

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?

By: Daniel Weinreb

Daniel Weinreb — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:54:22 +0000

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).

By: ken

ken — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:22:14 +0000

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!

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:38:36 +0000

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.

By: Aloysius

Aloysius — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:04:00 +0000

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.