by irrlab
“It was a provocative and humorous talk. David showed all the powerful features of LISP and said that the reason why LISP is not more adapted is that it is too powerful. Everybody laughed but it made me think. LISP was decades ahead of other languages, why did it not become a mainstream language?…”
http://blog.samibadawi.com/2013/05/lisp-prolog-and-evolution.html
by irrlab
“Parallelism and concurrency are both very fashionable notions. Lots of languages and tools are advertised as good at these things – often at both things.
I believe that concurrency and parallelism call for very different tools, and each tool can be really good at either one or the other. To oversimplify:
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/parallelism-and-concurrency-need-different-tools.html
by irrlab
“As a relatively new Common Lisp user, I’ve compiled a list of notes and tips on learning it. It’s a synthesis of my own experience, as well as my observations of the Lisp world. Lisp has a reputation as a hard to learn language, and I believe this is not the case, but there are such things as bumps on the road. Some of them are false beliefs about lisp that might scare people, others are actual nuisances that need to be dealt with, yet others are simply culture shock. Since Lisp is old, it has it’s own distinct culture and jargon, and people often get confused or put off by the differences…”
http://blog.ppenev.com/2013/04/24/learning-lisp-the-bump-free-way.html
by irrlab
“This is a syntax highlighter for Common Lisp written in Javascript. It is completely themable via CSS (themes included). The purpose of this is to make it really easy to embed beautiful Common Lisp code into a website with minimal effort…”
by irrlab
“I try to teach myself a new programming language in regular intervals of time. Recently, I’ve read how Lisp and its dialects are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from languages like C/C++, which made me curious enough to know more about it. However, two things are unclear to me, and I’m looking for guidance on them :
While eager to learn a language which is fundamentally different from the procedural languages I’m used to, I don’t want to invest undue effort in something if its totally obsolete – I’d still learn it if it was professionally “dead”, but only with an academic perspective…”
by irrlab
by irrlab
“A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. Thus, when we describe a language, we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas. Every powerful language has three mechanisms for accomplishing this:
In programming, we deal with two kinds of elements: procedures and data. (Later we will discover that they are really not so distinct.) Informally, data is “stuff” that we want to manipulate, and procedures are descriptions of the rules for manipulating the data. Thus, any powerful programming language should be able to describe primitive data and primitive procedures and should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data…”
by irrlab
“The solution uses:
by irrlab
by irrlab
“Matthew Flatt explains the Racket – a Lisp dialect – way through examples: everything is a program, concepts are language constructs, the language is extensible, and everything composes…”
