So this post is going to be about the high and downs of LISP. You can check out the amazing talk that Dick Gabriel gave on LISP history, it's capabilities and what he calls "The winter of LISP". Go ahead and check it out here.
I thinks it's a little bit sad to think about how great LISP is and all the capabilities that it has, and just see it as "God". We can not bring God down to earth so easily. Some of us, may go ahead and try and check it out, and then just think... wow... how the hell didn't I thought about this that way before?
It really hasn't been that long since I started learning what LISP is about. Today is about the third week I believe (maybe fourth, I don't know) since I started. And I already feel that this language should be the language of the future. After listening to this guru of LISP research, one of the biggest name in the community, it just made me feel a little dull. Knowing that everything is so cool on LISP, how come it failed? What is that made LISP fail so badly and now just appear sproadically on some projects?
I think that one of the things that made it so hard is the syntax, somehow, it's really easy to think in LISP, to say something like: (+ 1 2 3) and think about it as the sum of the numbers 1, 2 and 3. You can read it easily. In other languages, in the OOP spectrum of programming you would go ahead an implement a noun like a Adder and asign it an action that would be add and then do something like: Adder.add(1 2 3) in order to get the result you want.
If you understand this, you might get actual first big difference between functional programming and object-oriented programming. The difference relies on the verbs, and the nouns. I really encourage you to read this amazing writing that will help you understand the differences in such a fun and easy to understand way. So if you hace seen the differences and understand them, really as Halloway would say, the revenge of the verbs is a cool name for functional programming.
So, damn... really I'm amazed that something so big as LISP had to fell so hard from so high.
Today I think must of us, enthusiasts, scientists, students or hobbists would really like to see the magic of LISP go back to the top. I think the effort in doing this is actually languages like Clojure. Clojure is the language that I'm actually learning. The cool thing about Clojure (as far as I know) is that it implements a LISP for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). That meaning that you have all LISP capabilities plus the Java capabilities. This meaning that you can really run Clojure code on virtually any technology that has the the JVM, which is virtually every intelligent object on planet earth (ja-ja).
Maybe another way to see it is that LISP is like what we should aim for here in our planetary life. In our Earth-like understanding of things. Our efforts to bring it down to Earth today is the implementations of macro extensions in languages like Ruby, garbage collection like-in-LISP type of implementations and a lot of others. To run LISP on the things we already kind of know, Clojure.
So yeah, listening to this podcast by the software engineering radio was really interesting, to learn about what macros are, about LISP history, about the winter of LISP, and really about a different way to view things.
- Diego.
I thinks it's a little bit sad to think about how great LISP is and all the capabilities that it has, and just see it as "God". We can not bring God down to earth so easily. Some of us, may go ahead and try and check it out, and then just think... wow... how the hell didn't I thought about this that way before?
It really hasn't been that long since I started learning what LISP is about. Today is about the third week I believe (maybe fourth, I don't know) since I started. And I already feel that this language should be the language of the future. After listening to this guru of LISP research, one of the biggest name in the community, it just made me feel a little dull. Knowing that everything is so cool on LISP, how come it failed? What is that made LISP fail so badly and now just appear sproadically on some projects?
I think that one of the things that made it so hard is the syntax, somehow, it's really easy to think in LISP, to say something like: (+ 1 2 3) and think about it as the sum of the numbers 1, 2 and 3. You can read it easily. In other languages, in the OOP spectrum of programming you would go ahead an implement a noun like a Adder and asign it an action that would be add and then do something like: Adder.add(1 2 3) in order to get the result you want.
If you understand this, you might get actual first big difference between functional programming and object-oriented programming. The difference relies on the verbs, and the nouns. I really encourage you to read this amazing writing that will help you understand the differences in such a fun and easy to understand way. So if you hace seen the differences and understand them, really as Halloway would say, the revenge of the verbs is a cool name for functional programming.
So, damn... really I'm amazed that something so big as LISP had to fell so hard from so high.
Today I think must of us, enthusiasts, scientists, students or hobbists would really like to see the magic of LISP go back to the top. I think the effort in doing this is actually languages like Clojure. Clojure is the language that I'm actually learning. The cool thing about Clojure (as far as I know) is that it implements a LISP for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). That meaning that you have all LISP capabilities plus the Java capabilities. This meaning that you can really run Clojure code on virtually any technology that has the the JVM, which is virtually every intelligent object on planet earth (ja-ja).
Maybe another way to see it is that LISP is like what we should aim for here in our planetary life. In our Earth-like understanding of things. Our efforts to bring it down to Earth today is the implementations of macro extensions in languages like Ruby, garbage collection like-in-LISP type of implementations and a lot of others. To run LISP on the things we already kind of know, Clojure.
So yeah, listening to this podcast by the software engineering radio was really interesting, to learn about what macros are, about LISP history, about the winter of LISP, and really about a different way to view things.
- Diego.
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