Hallelujah!

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Sat Apr 3 22:12:33 1999

> I've finally gotten around to reading a LISP book that I had bought months
> before, and I can see why people refer to LISP as a religious experience
> (I've seen that said at least twice). It's really a wonderful language. I
> wonder how it is worse than BASIC or Perl. Also, although I didn't really
> take the time to really understand smalltalk (Squeak is slow and
> unstable), I can see the beginnings of smalltalk in LISP. Wow. This thing
> really is pretty amazing. This should be taught in every computer
> programming course, along with PAL-8, C, and Perl. I am now certain that
> if a language is hard to learn (C++ comes to mind), there's something
> wrong with it :)

Just think -- LISP is one of the oldest high-level computer languages ever,
and that it's still in use all the time in a form which is very similar to
versions that were written about forty years ago! There is probably a good
reason for that.

(Other old computer languages still in use are FORTRAN and COBOL, but I don't
think the reasons for using them are so good.)

I wouldn't say LISP is exactly the same; there are too many dialects and
people have thought of too many clever changes in the syntax and the
semantics. And even the original version on the IBM 7094 has a history
that's more complex than you would think (at least, _I_ don't understand all
the changes it went through). Also, Common LISP is orders of magnitude more
complex than LISP 1.5. But in spite of those changes, LISP's essence has
stayed the same.

By the way, "Common LISP" is the answer to "how is LISP worse than BASIC or
Perl?" :) It can be very complicated and unwieldy.

I hope you'll try Squeak again, though. Are you using UNIX? You may find
the MS-Windows and Mac versions more stable. Smalltalk's mechanism of
message passing and the "everything is an object" philosophy give it a
unique power.

To add something on-topic... I've been playing with Bob Supnik's PDP-1
simulator, which comes with a version of LISP. Has anyone looked at this?
I have some questions about the LISP code; I've also thought about extending
the character set emulated by the simulator.

-- Derek
Received on Sat Apr 03 1999 - 22:12:33 BST