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Lisp

 
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Lisp philosophy; something you should think about, if your into system design and implication. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/introduction-why-lisp.html
 
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Could you please elaborate a little bit about *what part* of the article we should think about? Thanks.

Cool language, by the way. Wish someone would pay me to use it...
 
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Aren't there speech therapists that can help?

Mark
 
Gerald Davis
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The nearest thing Common Lisp has to a motto is the koan-like description, "the programmable programming language." While cryptic, that description gets at the root of the biggest advantage Common Lisp still has over other languages. More than any other language, Common Lisp follows the philosophy that what's good for the language's designer is good for the language's users. Thus, when you're programming in Common Lisp, you almost never find yourself wishing the language supported some feature that would make your program easier to write, because, as you'll see throughout this book, you can just add the feature yourself.

Consequently, a Common Lisp program tends to provide a much clearer mapping between your ideas about how the program works and the code you actually write. Your ideas aren't obscured by boilerplate code and endlessly repeated idioms. This makes your code easier to maintain because you don't have to wade through reams of code every time you need to make a change. Even systemic changes to a program's behavior can often be achieved with relatively small changes to the actual code. This also means you'll develop code more quickly; there's less code to write, and you don't waste time thrashing around trying to find a clean way to express yourself within the limitations of the language.2

Common Lisp is also an excellent language for exploratory programming--if you don't know exactly how your program is going to work when you first sit down to write it, Common Lisp provides several features to help you develop your code incrementally and interactively.
 
Gerald Davis
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"In Lisp, you don�t just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward
your program."

This is what I have been trying to do by creating reusable libraries and non appplication spacific code. I am going to spend some of my time to learn Lisp, I might be a better geek for it.
 
Gerald Davis
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I talk about Lisp, you talk about Design Pattern; come on come on! this language could make you a wiser programmer; it is an opportunity you cannot miss.

If we all were English grammar geeks, I am sure we all would have read Shakespeare and his wonderful manipulation of the English language. He would inspire us to write wonderful books.

Learning Latin
�Latin caters for a wide interest group, including students interested in the Classical Heritage, in Law and in Christianity. It is generally acknowledged that a study of the Latin language improves linguistic fluency and logical thinking designed with the purpose of enhancing these skills.� Lisp is like Latin, you probably will not use it in a project, but it would improve your programming skill. It is a risk worth taking dudes.

The programming languages are much like real language, they can subtly or even less subtle influence on how a programmer does his coding. In George Orwell�s 1984 the Big Brother wanted to implement a language a new language ,New-Speak, to do exactly that.

PS: Isn�t it strange how the most popular languages are the worse then the better ones; in this order: C++ , Java , Pearl, Python, Smalltalk, Lisp.
 
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Learning more programming languages is useful. It's also very time consuming unless you just want to learn to program Fortran in another syntax. I resisted Java until I got paid to do it. My loss, I guess.

"better" or "worse" is completely personal, subjective and situational. Languages matter little. Designs matter much.
 
Gerald Davis
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But some languages encourage better design, the some way spoken languages influence behaviour differently, no?

In previous threads, I was talking about using how languages should choose for its specific need. And how VB or other scripting languages are good for creating application while low level languages like C,C++ and Java are good for creating libraries. Some successful projects use 3 different languages: a typical VB project uses VB to access C++ and SQL.

There are many languages and Metadata that influence design. Where would we be without SQL, HTML, XML, PHP Corba or any application specific Meta Language that exist or yet to exist. Meta Data is all what Lisp is about. Imagine creating a multi-tier not using any of these but only Java.

Design is very important however it requires quite a bit of intelligence, experience and pre-planning. Sorry man, but I don�t have the intelligence or experience, despite my undemanding of abstraction being very good. The overhead is concentration would to much maan!

Sometime the best way to create a system is just to hack at it and forget the cathedral and start digging the bazaar. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ The implementation has so much effect on design, that I am sure that many object oriented purists have realised. Prototyping is where is at baby!!!

Maybe the success of English from the English Empire to the USA is because of the spoken logical language and all of the emotional expressive power to create great works like Shakespeare. All of those wonderful love songs and rock bands, Barry White, Elvis Presley, James Brown, U2 the Beatles without a language like English there creative abilities would have been crushed and we would be have been sent back to the Eurovision Song Contest days.

Programming languages as well as spoken languages can influence the thought process. Imagine a world without your precious object objected languages , concurrent design, event driven design, recursion implementation. Many languages make you think about these in different ways.

Java has loads of container types VB has about 2 or 3 at most but can be configured to behave like almost any of Java�s. I don�t know which one is better , but I do know that language influence is big factor on design and building a system is about many design and implementation cycles.
[ March 31, 2005: Message edited by: Gerald Davis ]
 
Gerald Davis
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I was looking for material on functional programing and a found my own thread.
 
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