Like all things Lisp: no one understands the what, how and especially why of it.
This sounds extremely non-useful to me. Opening browser windows? For what? To do what, exactly?
And stop this "hacking" and "highly hackable" baloney.
This sounds extremely non-useful to me. Opening browser windows? For what? To do what, exactly?
And stop this "hacking" and "highly hackable" baloney.
I don't know if that's a fair thing to say; there are many lisp programmers out there, writing applications and tools, and they must understand the what, how, and why.
I've never used lisp beyond minor tutorials - but to me, it's just another programming language, albeit a somewhat strange one - IIRC, it doesn't have roots in ALGOL, which probably explains its "strangeness":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generational_list_of_programmi...
In fact - that shows it is one of the "root" programming languages. So there you go.
But beyond that, from what I have seen, it seems like a functional-style language built around the concept of everything (primitives?) being a "list" - which is kinda analogous to a mathematical set, I think.
Anyhow, while it may look and "feel" weird, I don't think that's a good reason to dismiss Lisp as a whole.
> This sounds extremely non-useful to me. Opening browser windows? For what? To do what, exactly?
Well - many people who work at the cli/shell level don't want to take their hands off their keyboards, unless absolutely necessary. So, this tool seems to make common tasks (search, browser links to info, often used commands/tasks) available and browsable, using the keyboard and terminal, for reuse - without needing to remember or recall from history a particular command or sequence, or having to set up a ton of aliases (and remembering them). At least, that's how I interpret it. Maybe that isn't for you; that's ok. But someone else might find such a thing handy.
> And stop this "hacking" and "highly hackable" baloney.
I'm not sure why this bothers you; the term "hack" to mean "change" (sometimes quick-n-dirty) has a long history. It doesn't have one meaning or application. I see nothing wrong with using it in this context. Sure, it may not be something you'd want to see on marketing material for an application (then again, seeing such might be a breath of fresh air, imho) - in this context, that of a tool by cli/shell user for other cli/shell users - it is perfectly fit for use, I think.
To the contrary, Algol took hints from Lisp when it created its if statement (as opposed to conditional GOTO) and subsequent Algol-style languages have only taken more from Lisp as the decades have gone on.
> But beyond that, from what I have seen, it seems like a functional-style language built around the concept of everything (primitives?) being a "list" - which is kinda analogous to a mathematical set, I think.
A "Lisp list" is a sequence which is implemented in terms of a singly-linked list. You can nest lists inside of each other arbitrarily, but if you want O(1) access times or easy element replacement, you should use other sequence types which are implemented in terms of arrays. Common Lisp, the modern Lisp dialect, has those.
If I had to give a high-level summary of modern Lisp, which is Common Lisp, I'd say that it's a dynamically-typed multi-paradigmatic programming language which supports the creation of mini-languages/DSLs through the use of advanced syntactic rewriting rules called macros.