What Makes Lisp Unique? | Hacker News Reader

What Makes Lisp Unique?

erikexplores.substack.com

33 pointssocialdemocrat13 comments

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> real world… Emacs… AutoCAD… Julia… LISP is probably not a language you end up using professionally

uh? No more examples??

- http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

- https://lisp-lang.org/success/

- https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

- Clojure?

- https://github.com/vindarel/list-of-languages-implemented-in... - https://github.com/dundalek/awesome-lisp-languages

As a user of (the modern) C++ I would still prefer Lisp's (lack of) syntax. The abundance of parentheses does not bother me, and I find, for example,

  [](){}

(valid C++ syntax) to be worse in comparison.

Matter of fact, pretty much any other syntax turns out to be worse. Kids get excited about JSX and yaml, and I chuckle. They love everything JSON without even realizing how much better EDN is. It's more concise, much more readable and a lot simpler to work with. Lisp syntax can be read on a phone screen - it wraps around but remains readable. Good luck trying that with Python.

>However, there are LISP flavored versions of C

For anyone interested the example given is from https://github.com/tomhrr/dale

Sorry to be that guy but the language name is written as Lisp, not LISP.

I have lot of books here that say otherwise.

We stopped capitalizing each letter in Lisp since Interlisp (sometime around 1960ies). I might be just making shit up, but I think the idea was to use "Lisp" when referring to the programming language dialects, and "LISP" when talking specifically about McCarthy's original thing. But don't quote me on that.

Anyway, Lisp isn't acronym anymore (or abbreviation, initialism?, mnemonic? I don't know what you call that). It doesn't always mean "LISt Processing" anymore.

So "that guy" is right. It's Lisp, not LISP. Well, most of the time it is.

Quite a few authors, including good ones, used LISP in the 1980's and into the 1990's.

Some examples:

Stuart C. Shapiro: LISP: An Interactive Approach (1986), Common LISP: An Interactive Approach (1992).

Robert Wilensky: Common LISPCraft (1986).

W. Richard Stark: LISP, Lore, and Logic: An Algebraic View of LISP Programming, Foundations, and Applications (1990)

Winston and Horn: LISP (1981-1989, 1st-3rd ed)

Steele's ClTl2 doesn't capitalize Lisp throughout the work per se, but the cover styles COMMON LISP in all caps. This leads to mistakes, like Amazon listing it as "Common LISP, The Language".

Well, yes, in the past, sure. But seasoned, contemporary Lispers, actively using Lisp to write programs don't usually do that these days, unless they are referring specifically to things like CLISP, XLISP, AutoLISP, etc. Even Common Lisp is no longer capitalized in each letter anymore. You can use whichever style you like. But just so you know, some Lispers may get annoyed.

But then again Lispers often get easily annoyed. Some of then get annoyed when you say "Clojure is a proper Lisp".

While that is all true, those old books are still useful and good, and by and large much better than newer books.

That could be one reason why newcomers still keep using "LISP".

Come to think of it, there must be people using "LISP" who were not even born prior to the first time (or even the umpteenth) someone was corrected in this matter on the Internet.

People who will one day write "LISP" into an online comment are not yet born, or still in diapers.

Maybe we need to target preschools and kindergartens?

Even the source code in the past was all caps...

LISP usually signals: the Lisp of the past is included.

Lisp then signals: Lisp since lowercase keys on keyboards were introduced ;-)

CLtl1 used "LISP" in a special capitalized way. CLtL2 then used "Lisp" for the same text.

"Lisp (historically LISP)" [0]

"Two twenty, two twenty-one; what's the difference?" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language) [1] quote from some movie for which I use to know the name of

Otter: I’m pre-law. Boon: I thought you were pre-med. Otter: What’s the difference?

-- Animal House

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