A friend and I agreed to pitch each other a programming language. He’ll give a 10 min intro to Scala where as I will give a 10 min intro to Lisp. I’m assuming that it doesn’t really matter whether I’m picking Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, or any other similar language.
=> Scala | Common Lisp | Scheme | Emacs Lisp
So what are the factors that attracted me to it? Maybe I should start with the books I read and liked, figure out why I liked them, and the focus on those elements? I mean, how much can I say in 10 minutes anyway... Brainstorming... I just realized that I already have a list of great books! → ProgrammingBooks.
Maybe A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming by Norvig (2002) would be a good place to get started. I also feel that the effect SICP had on me warrants a quick summary of the book, followed by the language features that allow us to do all that (written different object systems, lazy evaluation, an interpreter of the own language, a register machine, and implementation of the interpreter running on the register machine – mind blowing stuff, if I remember correctly).
=> A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming
Hm... I must think about this.
#Emacs #Lisp
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If he’s going to pitching a Scala, a JVM language, I’d recommend showing him Clojure, which also runs on the JVM. Clojure is shaping up to be a nice clean LISP with an emphasis on lazy sequences and clever handling of concurrency. It also riffs on LISP’s core idea: (eq? ’data ’code), by incorporating map, vector and set literals into the language not just for data, but as part of the program syntax. For exmaple, the argument list of a function definition in closure is not a list, but a vector. Finally, Clojure, like Scala, interfaces well with the underlying Java libraries.
– Ben 2009-04-10 06:56 UTC
Good point, thanks. Looking at Clojure for Lisp Programmers 1 & 2 found on Closure Blip TV.
– Alex Schroeder 2009-04-10 08:38 UTC
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