Comment by vseloved | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vseloved | Hacker News Reader

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The question should you program in Emacs Lisp or Common Lisp is meaningless. If you program for Emacs, you use Emacs Lisp, otherwise — Common Lisp. It would be very hard for you to do it the other way. I, actually, wonder how much knowledge about Lisp do you have, since you pose such question.

Regarding the question "Which Lisp?", it wasn't appropriate in that discussion, as the article was clearly about the use and features of Common Lisp. It was not discussing how an S-expression-based macro-language was a very good choice. To reduce the essence of Lisp to a simple notion of s-expressions + macros is a huge misconception, that I'm fighting here. Lisp is much more than s-expressions + macros. The proper question would be "Which S-expression-based language I want to use?" And posed in such way you should clearly see, that it is not a fit for this discussion. It would be much better, if everyone understood well the full feature-set of Lisp :)

My point was exactly that the allowed usage you propose, where Emacs Lisp is a Lisp and Clojure, for instance, is not, is quite ridiculous. The disallowed usage, "Which Lisp should I use, Clojure or Common Lisp?" is however, not ridiculous. Your rule excludes a meaningful usage and includes a ridiculous one.

I'm not saying that Common Lisp reduces to s-expressions and syntax extension or even that "lispness" does, only that s-expressions and syntax extension are the features to which the denotation "a lisp" most frequently refers.

Incidentally, I program in Common Lisp for a living and am the author of several libraries in several lisp dialects, which, while not enjoying much use, do demonstrate a working knowledge of the language family. But thanks for imputing my qualifications.

I don't think, that the question "Which Lisp should I use: Clojure or Common Lisp?" is quite correct. As they are really so different in very basic concepts: mutable vs immutable, OO vs non-OO, bootstrapped vs JVM-based, and the list can go on and on. This question is of the same sort of "Should I use Lisp (I mean Common Lisp) or Python?" And it can be reduced t "Which dynamic language should I use?" Or "Should I use Lisp or Java?" - "Which memory-managed system programming language should I use?" Likewise "Should I use Lisp or Clojure?" can be reduced to "Which s-expression based language should I use?"

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