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Re: Lisp talk



Chen Shapira <chen@mercury.co.il> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Obviously most people here don't know much about functional languages
> (lisp/scheme) besides the fact that they use brackets extensivly.
> 
> As you might have guessed - most languages have more to them than
> syntax.

Quite a few don't even have a useful syntax, let alone ideas. Just
kidding.

IMHO, lisp syntax is one of the most elegant of all programming
languages. Prefix notation, absence of precedence rules, uniformity,
and a lot of other virtues make life really easy on the developer.
And that's besides the well-known (or not so well-known) points about
closures, functions as first-class objects, bottom-up development (I'm
just listing buzz-words with real meaning), and everything else that
is in the realm of "ideas" (quoting Chen).

It amused me how a few people both Chen and me respect (right, Chen?)
typed a lot of nonsensical gibberish as examples / mock ups / grammar
flames of lisp code. Just how easy will it be for the same people to
write perfectly legal Perl/C/Java/bash/whatever code that will look
even more like gibberish? And, being Linux professionals/advocates,
how often do we hear things like "Linux? You type (arghh!) commands
there, right?" (cf. "Lisp? You use parentheses (ughhh!) there,
right?")

My religion is better...

Chen, should we hijack IGLU as the Israeli Group of Lisp Users? ;-)

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | BLOOMBERG L.P. (BFM) | oleg@bfr.co.il
"... We work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
 And wit depends on dilatory time." - W. Shakespeare.


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