Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand arguments of the kind: "Lisp A vs. Lisp B". A Lisp is a Lisp. I am honestly so grateful for my younger self for the decision I made years ago to learn Lisp. These days, pretty much any platform, any hardware, or a VM supports at least one dialect of Lisp. And that's awesome!

I switch between Lisps with relative ease: Scheme, Fennel, Clojure, Elisp, Common Lisp - they feel pretty much the same language. Yes, each has its own oddities and quirks, but I still feel like if I'd discovered some ancient secret - learn it and you start understanding every possible human language. That's how knowing and "breathing" Lisp feels sometimes.

Because Lisp is not a language. It's an idea. An incredibly awesome one. Arguably - the most influential idea in Computer Science. "Once in a millennia" idea.

That's why I never feel anxious about the popularity of programming languages. I don't care what's in the top of RedMonk or TIOBE or whatever else. I don't care if some new programming language gets promoted by the Queen of England, Supreme Pontiff, or Dalai Lama. If it's not a Lisp - it has an expiration date. Lisp, though, will never die.

I think of the "Lisp A vs. Lisp B" discussions like describing the nuances of you favorite color. My favorite color is yellow, but that covers a lot of ground. I prefer a nice bright lemon yellow, but don't care for mustard yellow or brown as much. But any Lisp is better than Fortran just as I prefer any yellow over purple, for example.

I prefer Scheme to most other Lisps because of guaranteed TCO, the way continuations are handled, regularity of function names, and define-syntax macros.

Within the Scheme family, I usually prefer Chez for its performance, its FFI and because I happen to prefer an R6RS compliant system at the moment.

Just nuances.

> I don't understand arguments of the kind: "Lisp A vs. Lisp B". A Lisp is a Lisp. I am honestly so grateful for my younger self for the decision I made years ago to learn Lisp. These days, pretty much any platform, any hardware, or a VM supports at least one dialect of Lisp. And that's awesome!

“Lisp” is no more a language family than “curly braces" is. Individual Lisps are often further apart from each other than either from various other languages.

> I switch between Lisps with relative ease

The only relevant measure is: how much actual code do you switch?

Because otherwise that's just like saying "I switch between brain surgery, jazz saxophone, chess and rock climbing with relative ease".

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