What do you think about newLISP, a scripting language that claims to be a LISP dialect? | Hacker News Reader

What do you think about newLISP, a scripting language that claims to be a LISP dialect?

3 pointsaaco8 comments

I'd like to hear opinions, impressions, criticism about it. Would it be a considerable language for professional or secure programs?

For those who still don't know it: http://www.newlisp.org/

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[Diplomatic Hat On] I would personally stick with a Scheme or with one of the better CLs (SBCL, etc.) over newLISP.

NewLISP is interesting for the space it occupies and it can be fun, but it also has some really wonky ideas that I think are mistakes and that will make it more difficult for you to grok other Lisps in the future. It is not a horrible language, but I think a person's time would be much better spent learning another Lisp. I would suggest that you Google comp.lang.lisp for newLISP. That should provide you with plenty of 'criticism' to digest. Several other people have asked the exact same question before on comp.lang.lisp.

Then, go to: http://gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/ once you've moved on ;-)

Thanks for the advice.

Actually I'm already studying Common Lisp (from the Practical common Lisp book), and, well, I really liked its concepts. And surely, it can be used for practical purposes. It's a different and old language, I believe it's worthy to be studied.

Cool.

PCL is a great book. And, yes, CL is incredibly practical for many purposes. PCL/CL are much more worthy of your time than newLISP.

First and foremost, I think "newLISP" is an horrible name. What will they do when "newLISP" is 10 years old? Or maybe they don't expect it to survive that long?...

Heh, actually it already reached that point, more than 10 years old I think.

From http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2007/04/19/interview-with-lutz-...

"Lutz: newLISP started on SunBSD in the early 90's, then moved to Windows 3.0/1 as a 16-bit application, then to Windows 95/98 as a 32-bit program. During all that time newLISP was more like a hobby for me. Around 1999/2000 I made it Open-Source under the GPL license on Linux."

I think it's a horrible name because newLISP's dynamic scoping with static scope simulated through namespaces seems pretty old-fashioned to me.

Depends on what you want it to do. Do you want to learn LISP or do you want newLISP to do a particular task? As a scripting language it does it's job very nice. I first started to use it when I needed a small, but flexible language that worked well on Windows. newLISP does the job just right.

A nice feature is the ability to compile a newLISP script to a standalone executable that does not require a newLISP interpreter. I hacked together a quick and dirsty script that my colleages at work like a lot - a script that cleans up crap in their windows profile directory. :-)

I have no experience with other LISPs though, and thus am not competent to say whether newLISP is a "true" LISP. To me that really does not matter - as long as the tool does the job.

Good luck.

No gensym is an annoying decision to work around. Yeah you can hack it in, but...

If you want to use a lisp then choose the one with the most vitality, aka SBCL.

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