I surrender. Lisp really is better than C++. | Hacker News Reader

I surrender. Lisp really is better than C++.

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15 pointsjcwentz15 comments

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"Up until now, everything that I'd seen done in Lisp could easily be done in C++ too. The only real difference was a little more verbosity. But the unit-testing framework that was developed in that chapter..."

Interesting that a unit testing framework was the final straw. It's horrible not being able to use closures.

It's usually lack of garbage collection that gets to me the fastest. Closures are a close second, but those you can easily fake in nearly any language. In Java, anonymous classes usually do the job. In C with GNU extensions, you can use nested functions as callbacks, with the caveat that they'll only be available within the dynamic scope of the caller.

http://www.boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/shared_ptr.htm

Granted, it's not garbage collection, but sometimes you have to write C++ and boost makes that manageable. boost::shared_ptr is based on refcounts, so you need to be aware of cycles and use boost::weak_ptr accordingly.

Lack of garbage collection built into the language, you mean? I'm not disagreeing with you, just clarifying.

Yes.

I think he missed the biggest differentiator between C++ and Lisp - it's fun to program in Lisp!

Almost anything is better than C++!

PG, you started a movement.

Well, not everyone is convinced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461

"X is better than Y" is meaningless. Better for what under what specific conditions, and how so?

Oh god, here we go ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com