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Re: [Axiom-developer] Lisp


From: root
Subject: Re: [Axiom-developer] Lisp
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:12:59 -0500

>> Either you "get it" or you don't. There is no half-way with Lisp.  
>> There are no words to explain what it means to "get it" until you do 
>> ... and then there is no reason to explain it; you get it. 
>
>Well ... many years ago I "got" Lisp. I told myself at the time that if 
>I had to use one programming language for the rest of my career, it 
>would be Lisp. And there were Lisp machines -- was it three vendors, two 
>or four?
>
>About four years ago, I got back into Lisp during a workshop on 
>algorithmic composition. You know what? A couple of decades with other 
>languages, especially Perl and R, convinced me that Lisp, while an 
>elegant conceptual framework, was woefully lame as a *practical* 
>language. And now there's Ruby.
>
>So I saw the whole elephant. But I don't think I care to ride on it any 
>more.

That's fair. There was no claim that lisp is the right language for
any particular purpose. Ruby is fine and Rails is the fastest path
to a website solution. Lisp is ill suited for that purpose and for
many other purposes.


Spad is a conceptually different level of language and is not
syntactic sugar. It is clear that you want a spad-like language to do
mathematics. Lisp is ill-suited for that purpose also.

But boot is syntactic sugar.

The real question is, do you understand why "syntactic sugar" languages
like boot disable the key strength of Lisp? 

Tim




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