Currently reading.

Currently reading.

Lisp may not be an acceptable Lisp* but Clojure just might be.

* http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.au/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptable-lisp.html?m=1

18 thoughts on “Currently reading.

  1. I hadn’t realized that LISP went through a mini-revival because of Paul Graham – I think it must be a sign of success that someone felt compelled to write an article in 2006 trying to convince me that LISP wasn’t really popular (I haven’t seen any articles trying to convince me that Pascal or COBOL aren’t really popular). LISP was dear to my heart in the mid 1980s, and Scheme is where I learned about closures (many years before they became trendy – so I guess I’m a hipster coder).

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  2. I agree that the syntax is key. It’s also the thing that had put me off going deeper into it for years. I’m taking that opportunity now. Common Lisp feels bloated and clunky but I like the feel of Clojure quite a bit. I feel like I can almost read it.

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  3. Yes, Common LISP is a bit much — I remember struggling through Guy Steele’s book in the 1980s, and realizing even then (as a not-yet-cynical 20-something) that it was trying to do too much.  eLisp is messy, but it’s cool to have Emacs as the platform for running it, and we’ve seen lots of great stuff prototyped in Emacs/Elisp.  I started with InterLISP (the first language in which I coded for $$), about which the less said, the better.

    Scheme is simple and elegant, plus it has closures, which young developers think they’re discovering now for the first time (the same way that the peak Baby Boomers thought they were inventing sex for the first time when they hit adolescence in the 1960s).

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