Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More

A few weeks ago, you asked Kent M. Pitman about Lisp, Scheme, standards, and other things -- He's answered your questions below, at length. At such length, in fact, that only the first eleven of his answers are shown below -- expect more shortly! Thanks, Kent.

1) (just one thing (I) want to (know))?
by An Anonymous Coward

((
What (
(is) with (all)
) of (the) ()s?
)
Hmmm?
)

Kent M. Pitman: This question actually got scored down to -1 and marked as a troll question, but I fished it out of the barrel and restored it because everyone asks and I might as well confront the issue head-on.

Ironically it's non-Lisp languages that allow and encourage you to put ()'s in any place you want, as if there were no meaning to the introduction of gratuitous paren groups.

3+(2*5)+7 means the same thing in an algebraic language as does 3+2*5+7. In Lisp, we write:

(+ 3 (* 2 5) 7)

This shows you the structure and means you never have to learn obscure precedence rules that make expressions like -3! confusing in algebraic languages, where you must learn whether it means (-3)! or -(3!). In Lisp, the parens would show you immediately that (factorial -3) or (- (factorial 3)) was intended.

The thing I personally like about (+ (* 2 y) x) rather than 2*y+x is that it simplifies my editing. I'm a touch-typist and I use the emacs commands to go forward and backward over expressions, to swap expressions, and to delete expressions very heavily. And I don't have to reach for the mouse to manipulate large, complex expressions because they are paren-bounded. If I put the cursor at the head of 2*y+x and say "go forward an expression", ought this go forward over 2, 2*y, or 2*y+x? Having different editor commands to move across a sum, a product, etc. would be unwieldy. Yet without that, I don't see how the editor would know. In Lisp, there can't be any ambiguity because every sub-expression has its own start character, so a single notion of "the expression in front of the cursor" or "the expression after the cursor" suffices.

This, by the way, also answers the question of why we don't write foo(x) and instead write (foo x). In Lisp notation, foo is an expression. In the expression (foo x), it's a subexpression, so it's enclosed within it. Were it outside, a text editor would not be sure if foo(x) were one expression (a function call) or two expressions (the symbol foo followed by the list (x)). That would make going forward over 'one expression' ambiguous when at the start of foo(x). Should the cursor end up after the foo or after the (x)? In other words, The natural purpose of parentheses is to enclose things, so that's what Lisp uses them for. Avoiding ambiguity is critical to the writing of correct "keyboard macros" in Emacs, where I might interactively write a program to do a lot of code transformations quickly. In an algebraic language, such keyboard macros can be much harder to write robustly.

2) It's not just me is it?
by demo9orgon

After trying to "self-learn" lisp in the 80's I get this physical reaction to the word "lambda"...a cold sweat combined with the involuntary retraction of my testicles to a protected location in my abdomen (damn unpleasant shit)...I usually avoid that second one by mentally going through the mechanics of "hello world" in C, or any half-a-dozen other programming languages.

Lisp is one of those meta-languages you either learn or avoid. I write practical stuff all the time, daily in fact, and I've never had something that required the arcane stuff in LISP.

KMP: Actually, "hello world" in Lisp looks like this:

(defun hello-world ()
(write-line "Hello, World!"))

I don't know about you, but I find that pretty soothing.

And as to LAMBDA, one only needs use it when they find it useful. For example, after a while, one sometimes gets tired of writing a separate function where that function will only be used once, as in:

(defun sort-by-name (list)
(sort list #'name<))

(defun name<(name1 name2)
(or(string<(last-name name1) (last-name name2))
&nbsp(and (string= (last-name name1) (last-name name2))
(string< (first-name name1) (first-name name2)))))

so Lisp allows one to instead say:

(defun sort-by-name (list)
(sort list #'(lambda (name1 name2)
(or (string< (last-name name1) (last-name name2))
(and (string= (last-name name1) (last-name name2))
(string< (first-name name1) (first-name name2)))))))

Whether one actually does this is purely a personal preference. Some people like having separate named functions, some don't. Sometimes the separately named function might have a nonsensical name, though, and it's nicer not to have to invent a stupid name for a one-shot use.

Now, as to why it's called LAMBDA and not FUNCTION, that's just a piece of history. You get used to it. Toward that end, I'll offer a story that will perhaps help you put it in perspective:

Early in my not-yet career as a computer scientist, which is to say, while I was in high school, I lived in the Panama Canal Zone. Computers were not at all common there at the time. In fact, the place being entirely run by the US Government, there was some weird edict that said no one was allowed to own one so that they would all be centralized in the Comptroller's Office and not wasted in individual offices around the Zone. Our school had to bend the rules in order to get us a computer to study. So one thing I did while trying to learn about computers was to go downtown (out of the Canal Zone into Panama City, in the Republic of Panama) and visit a company there who did computer work. Of course, people there spoke Spanish, but fortunately I did, too. They showed me some of their code, and I was immediately struck by the fact that all the language keywords were in English.

"Doesn't that bother you?" I asked. But the person I was talking to was quite a thoughtful person and he immediately responded this way: "Do you know how to read music?" "A little," I said. "Have you seen the notations on music like forte, sotto voce, and so on?" I nodded. "Does it bother you that they are in Italian?" "No," I had to admit. His point was to make me see that it could be viewed as part of the charm and history of the notation. He was, perhaps, unusually forgiving. But this was in the late 1970s, when everyone who had access to computers was far too excited about just plain having them to care about subtle issues of whose culture got too much say in the design of a world-wide phenomenon.

So when today I look at the very few mysterious-looking terms like LAMBDA, CAR, and CDR that still linger untouched in modern Lisp's design, I think of them as I do those musical notations, conceptual links to a little piece of history that I'm just as happy not to see crushed by an overeager rush to regularize and homogenize the world--something the computer culture has done altogether too much of.

3) Interactively programmable applications
by divbyzero ([e-mail])

One of the primary reasons why Scheme and Lisp interest me is that they are well suited for making applications interactively programmable at runtime (Scheme especially, due to its small size). This is far more flexible and useful than applications which are only extensible through heavyweight, precompiled plugins. Since the Slashdot readership tends to be made up of people who are comfortable with programatic interfaces (unlike the general computer-using public), why do we not see more such applications?

KMP: I think it's just an issue of education, formal and otherwise. Without being explicitly guided, some people will try out all kinds of ways to do things, or invent them where they're not present. But many others will simply do what they have been taught to do without exploring the alternatives.

In the past, everything was about speed. Every instruction was precious. The focus was entirely on "micro" efficiency. People would examine the cost of being able to redefine something (which sometimes involves as much as following pointer indirection), and if there was a cycle lost, the game was over. Today, hardware cache and prefetch architectures can often hide such costs anyway, but even if they couldn't, processors run so fast that one has time to worry not only about micro efficiency but also macro efficiency--that is, "running smart", not just "running fast", as a way of assuring total efficiency.

A lot of people identify Lisp as a language that is "just good for Artificial Intelligence (AI)". Certainly Lisp is good for AI. But saying it is just good for AI misses the point. Lisp doesn't do AI. Lisp is a programming language. AI researchers program AI, and often their language of choice has been and continues to be Lisp. But the important thing is that AI researchers have been banging on the door of Lisp implementors for years, demanding the introduction and tuning of the features and constructs they need in order to get their work done. Lisp hasn't become a mere AI toolbox as a result of that. Rather, it has become a robust tool for addressing the world's most complex and vexing problems. The Lisp community has a long experience with supporting "intelligent programming", and with doing so efficiently.

Lisp's biggest problem in the past is probably that it hit its commercial peak too early, in the mid 1980s, before most computational problems the world was confronting were big enough to need the power Lisp had to offer. Those were the days of MacWrite and MacPaint and Lotus 1-2-3, and it just didn't make any difference whether one used Lisp or C for those. But for better or worse, the world has grown up around us, and the important problems of the day are a lot more complex. I think Lisp has a lot more to offer to the world of today than it ever did in the past.

4) The standard process
by VP

As participant in the standardization process for Lisp, what are your thoughts on standards for programming languages? What would you like to see different in this process? And speaking of standards, what do you think about the RAND licensing issue and the W3C?

KMP: I think standards have served their time to provide a stable base for people to build on, but for the modern environment, they move way too slowly to keep pace with the speed of change in business. It took a long time to put the Common Lisp standard together. We began in 1986, finished work in 1994, and got the actual document to press just before the end of 1995. Getting community consensus on something that big really does take that long, and I think it was an exercise worth doing to create the stable base that we created, but for future evolution of the language, I think there needs to be another way with far less overhead.

I see standards as having two components: The first is to simply cast a name into concrete so that reference to that name will always have a clear meaning. The definition of ANSI Common Lisp, at least for 1994, is now permanently registered. Anyone who wants to can now conform to that definition and others will know exactly what they mean by that. The second component is to assert an informal consensus in the community that there is a single right way of doing things. This latter component may be useful for the foundation (to define the initial market space), but I'm not sure it's appropriate for the library level of the language.

For the base language, if 60% of the community wanted to do things one way and 40% another way, the 60% got to roll over the 40%, and 100% of the community was expected to do things in the way that won. But at the library level, if 60% want one library and 40% want another, I'd rather 100% of the community get what they want by having some people just do it one way and the rest of the people do it the other way. The Lisp community has not traditionally done things that way; they've sought consensus. The Scheme community has been even more conservative about this than the Common Lisp community, and as a result has even fewer standardized facilities than the Common Lisp community.

The Scheme community has moved to a more loose-knit approach to break the design deadlock brought on by the core language committee's consensus process through its Scheme Requests for Implementation (SRFI) process. The Common Lisp community hasn't got anything quite so organized yet, but I suspect will eventually evolve something similar.

---

As to the question of the W3C, I'm not a huge fan at the moment. At a prior employer, we had the opportunity to join, but the contract we'd have had to sign made it clear that votes among members were advisory only, and W3C itself could decide to override what people voted on. This, to me, is not a consensus body. Furthermore, although I think standards bodies like ANSI move in near glacial time, I don't think you can fix things by just shortening the times. True national and global consensus just takes time, and shortening timelines doesn't just make things move faster, it also disenfranchises people. While I use the existing HTML, CSS, XML, XSL, and other W3C guidelines, I don't feel they were created in a manner that I respect as proper consensus process. I think the process was insular and rushed.

---

Neither am I happy with the notion of processes involving Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) fees being part of a standard; I think consensus standards should only involve royalty-free (RF) technologies. I think adherence to standards should not induce a baseline cost beyond the cost of creating the code so that the cost of compliance with standards can closely approach zero. If there is a profit to be made on the implementation of a standard, it should go to the implementor, not to a patent holder. Then again, while I'm a strong proponent of software copyright, I'm not at all a fan of software patents. Rather than seeing independent creation as infringement, I think independent creation should be contributory proof that an idea was more obvious than perhaps the patent office thought. I don't mind copyright because there are ways that one can demonstrate that one did not merely copy another's work, and independent creation is a defense.

5) Advice to Aspirants
by An Anonymous Coward

Kent, I am one of the lucky ones who programs professionally in Common Lisp. I certainly appreciate your hard work and the hard work of everyone else who helped to bring us the ANSI standard - which serves to reify much of the esoteric knowledge the Lisp community has developed in the many years since the language was born.

While I do not need to be sold on Lisp, I know many people who do not fully appreciate the power of the language. To a large degree, this is due to misconceptions about the language. Specifically, there seem to be a number of what I would call 'cultural misconceptions'. Because many people have never worked in a tightly interactive development environment with incremental compilation, language-level introspection, and real code/data equivalence (not to mention the differences between CLOS and what the rest of the world seems to have come to believe is the God-given definition of 'object-oriented' programming) - they don't really 'get' what makes Lisp so special and so powerful. More to the point, because the logistics of developing and deploying applications in Lisp is different than what the typical c/c++/perl/java developer knows, the hurdle to even investigating or considering Lisp as a real possibility seems unnecessarily high.

Could you talk a bit about how those who have a feeling that Lisp might help them with their hard problems could go about bootstrapping their way into finding out? How would you suggest getting started? What is a reasonable set of tools for experimentation, and where should a beginner start with the language? (The standard is a big document!) Also, could you give an example of the type of problem space and style of application delivery that demonstrates that Lisp is more practical than many seem to believe?

KMP: Well, one thing to note is that there's very little overhead to just downloading an implementation and diving in. Not only do the major commercial vendors like Xanalys and Franz offer high quality, no-cost trial versions of their proprietary software, but there are quite a number of free (non-proprietary) versions of Lisp as well. Information about these, as well as much other useful information about Lisp, can be found at the Association of Lisp Users (ALU) web site. I've also recently purchased common-lisp.info, which I plan to maintain as a repository for information about Common Lisp; the site doesn't have a large base of information yet, but it does have a list of the problem spaces in which you might consider using Lisp.

The ANSI Common Lisp standard, effectively available in webbed form as the Common Lisp HyperSpec, is indeed a big document (about 16MB and having about 108 kilohyperlinks downloadable). I think it's fairly readable as standards go. But you're right that it takes some work to get through and it wasn't really intended as a tutorial.

The ALU web site will also have pointers to books and online tutorials about Lisp. Books by Paul Graham and Peter Norvig on the subject are very highly regarded. I think there is always room for more, and I'm working on several, at least one of which I hope to complete in the not too distant future; feedback from you and others is useful to me in understanding what areas most urgently require treatment.

One resource that some people might find useful is an article I wrote called Accelerating Hindsight: Lisp as a Vehicle for Rapid Prototyping. This article is intended primarily for a Lisp programmer audience, to help them articulate some of the ideas you've asked about to others. It was not intended to be read by the audience you'd like to convince mainly because it appeals periodically to Lispy notation that might not be familiar to them, but it may still be of interest to the adventurous non-Lisp reader.

As your project becomes more sophisticated, and evolves from a personal toy to a real commercial product, it also doesn't hurt to ask an expert for help. My company offers consulting services that include helping companies manage the transition into Lisp. One of my major clients, The Software Smith approached me on just such a basis and the result has been very exciting both for me (getting to help them improve their system) and, I think, for them (getting to see more of how Lisp is supposed to be used). I don't want to turn this interview into a huge advertisement, but people can contact me for more information. If I'm either not competent to help you or am too busy to help you, there's a very good chance I can refer you to someone else who can help you.

6) Language feature trickle-down
by WillWare

I was a big Scheme/Lisp fan five or six years ago, but now I see most of my favorite Lisp-like language features available in Python, which is getting a huge amount of high-quality development mindshare these days. Some of the Lisp-ish features in Python that spring right to mind are functions as objects, closures, garbage collection, and dynamic-yet-strong typing, and convenient rapid-app development.

One needn't look far to find arguments that there is still something unique to Lisp that differentiates it even from very recent languages which have had ample opportunity to borrow from Lisp. But one rarely finds a really clear articulation of that uniqueness. Do you think concur with the view that Lisp is still unique, and if so, do you think that Lisp's putative advantage really is ineffable?

If there is an advantage but it's ineffable and therefore opaque to managers with purchasing power, that would explain why Franz, Harlequin, et al have had such a rocky road. Does the Lisp/Scheme community regard this as a worrisome issue? (Some folks on c.l.lisp clearly don't think so, but I don't know if they are just a noisy minority.)

KMP: I guess I think Lisp is unique, but whether it is or not doesn't affect its usefulness as a tool. I'll enumerate some things I like about Lisp, but Slashdot readers shouldn't assume that I'm asserting for each of these features that Lisp has a lock on these. Various other languages surely have some of these. But I am often heard to say: languages are ecologies. Language features are not a priori good or bad. Rather, language features are good or bad in context, based on how well they interact with other language features. Some of what makes Lisp what it is has to do with the features it offers, but some of what makes Lisp what it is has to do with how the features work together to make a coherent whole. Lifting some of these features out of context might sometimes work, but in other cases, it might not. To get a real feel for Lisp, or any language, I think you have to really use it.

Also, in my 1994 article Lambda, the Ultimate Political Party, I advance the hypothesis that languages are defined as much by their community as by their semantics. That is, languages are forever in flux, and the semantics you read about in a language spec is a point in a multi-dimensional space telling you the current location, but it does not tell you the velocity vector in that space. For that, you must look to the community. Even if two languages happened to occupy precisely the same point in design space, that is, if they had the same semantics, would they continue to over time? I think not.

For what it's worth, here are just some of the things I personally like about ANSI Common Lisp:

• Lisp is dynamic. The world is ever changing and it's useful to allow programs to change dynamically with it. I can load new or changed functions, classes, and method definitions into a running image that I'm debugging, or even in a deployed production application. When I do, the code that was running will immediately start using the new definitions. Classes can be redefined even if the new class has different slots, and, if I care to, I can control how the update is done from old to new slot arrangements for already-created instances. This kind of thing supports programs that must be continually running yet must be responsive to changes or even just bug fixes.

• Lisp is introspective. Not only can functions, packages, classes, methods be dynamically added, redefined, or removed, but programs can also inquire about whether aspects of the programming environment (functions, packages, classes, and so on) are defined, can manipulate those objects as data, can save them away, can transform or encapsulate them, etc. Also, the Lisp compiler is a standard part of the language and can be invoked even at runtime by applications that need to augment themselves. New programs can be created on the fly, then compiled and loaded and executed in the same running image as they were created, without ever exiting (and even without doing file I/O). This facilitates automatic programming and the development of layered languages.

• Lisp's syntax is malleable. There's nothing worse than being stuck in a syntax that you don't like in a language you're going to use for a long time. Lisp allows programmers to reconfigure the syntax rules for parsing characters into data and programs, as well as allowing macro technology that transforms one parsed program expression into another. And it allows control of how data is displayed during program execution and debugging. Moreover, this can generally be done in such a way that one programmer's customizations don't adversely impact another's. This makes interactions with Lisp more pleasant and debugging sessions more productive.

• Lisp doesn't force users to use variable type declarations in order to just get a program to run. The initial focus in Lisp is on getting programs working. You can add type declarations when you're done if you want to, in order to enable additional compiler optimizations. This facilitates rapid prototyping by first getting an application running quickly with low overhead, and then allowing an application to be tuned as a second pass operation.

• Lisp has a powerful class system, and a flexible meta-class system. The class system allows powerful slot and method definition, method combination, and a great many other detailed features. The meta-class system allows users to treat the object system as data that can be programmed, creating new kinds of classes.

• Lisp gives the user powerful tools for both signaling and handling errors. This means that when an error occurs, there are often a variety of ways to continue programs other than simply aborting or dumping core. Moreover, object-oriented error handling allows programs to represent errant situations, evaluate the options for how to proceed, and select an appropriate option under program control.

• Lisp uses automatic memory management. This means that when a programmer is done with an object, they just let go of it and the garbage collector reliably frees its storage. This means Lisp programs do not suffer from the memory leaks that commonly plague programmers in many other languages.

7) What will it take to make Lisp fashionable again?
by kfogel

For myself and a number of friends, Lisp/Scheme programming has for too long been a kind of mystical Eden, fading in our memories, from which we have been mostly banished in our professional lives. But we can still recall how it felt to work in a language able to shape itself to any pattern our minds might ask: coding was more interesting and more expressive, and the rate of increasing returns over time was tremendous, because fine-grained -- almost continuous -- abstraction was in the nature of the language. Life was just more fun, frankly.

Alas! In our jobs and even in our personal projects, we are often forced to use C, C++, Java, Perl, or Python -- not because we prefer to write in those languages, but for two much less satisfying reasons: first, everyone else knows those languages, so we'll get more developers with them. And second, you can't count on users and testers having the right environment to run programs written in Lisp/Scheme, so right away you take a portability hit if you choose to develop in them.

Do you think there is a chance of Lisp/Scheme becoming "mainstream" again? That is, when someone contemplates starting a project, it would be as realistic for them to consider Lisp or Scheme as, say, Perl, without worrying about losing developers or initial testers? What will it take?

KMP: First, let me say that I really appreciate the poetic description you offer in the first paragraph above. I very much think that captures how I and others think about the experience of using Lisp.

And as to the future of Lisp, I think the situation for Lisp is looking pretty upbeat these days. Enough so that my own infant business is building its tools in Lisp, both for sale and for our own internal use on products we produce.

There are a lot of implementations, both commercially maintained and "free", with a wide range of delivery options, from conventional executables to "remote" solutions: Some implementations support CORBA and/or COM interfaces, for example. Also, most implement some kind of sockets interface, and there are several Lisp-based web servers available that build on this. Lisp programs can dynamically load DLLs, or can be delivered as DLLs themselves. They can do "foreign function call" to functions in other languages. It can also communicate with databases, and so with other programs via databases.

As the world moves increasingly to high-bandwidth global connectivity, I think the issue of the delivery environment will become less important. People have been waiting for an e-Service based society to take off, and it hasn't quite done that yet, but I think it's coming. I can't see how it won't. The overall savings in quality assurance and support of not having to re-deploy an application in a hostile customer-premise environment will be a lot, just as your question implies. One will just bring an application up on the right kind of hardware, connect it to the net, and then forget about where the program is actually being used. That may be an oversimplification today, but I wouldn't waste my money betting against it for tomorrow.

8) Questions I've Come Across Learning Lisp
by Jon Howard

I was recently (April) hired-on as webmaster at Franz [franz.com], a commercial lisp company (we make Allegro Common Lisp [franz.com]) which has introduced me to lisp in a very loud way. Since joining these guys (and gals), I've been thoroughly indoctrinated - with my full consent - because of my belief that as computing hardware progresses programming in more abstract languages will allow for more creative and effective use of the platform. Sure, coding assembler on a new super-duper petaflop chip will still be possible and less wasteful, but who would want to code a million lines of asm to save a few (or even a few thousand) operations out of a few billion, or trillion when it will only net a difference of nanoseconds in the end? I'm less interested in making super-fast programs than I am in making artistic and super-functional programs.

I'm not expressing the views of Franz, every member of the company has their own beliefs on what makes for great programming - which is one of the major reasons I find this place so fulfilling, everyone has complex reasons for their design considerations, and everyone communicates them (something I've grown to appreciate from working in too many places where this was definitely not the case), and consequently I've been exposed to quite a few different techniques of Lisp coding since my introduction half a year ago. I'm constantly amazed that so many different styles of programming can be expressed in the same language, it's capable of accommodating any logical thought process that can be converted to code - and I doubt many of you often use recursion in a logical way on a daily basis, but even that can be done efficiently in lisp.

I'm still very new to lisp, and I was never a serious programmer in the past, but I've always been accustomed to asking questions, and here are a few that I'd like some input on:

• If you learned any other programming language, did you initially find the formalities of its structure to be a significant stumbling block to understanding the language as a whole? Was the same true of learning lisp?
• How much time do you spend debugging non-lisp code? How much on lisp?
• What language took you the most time to learn - was it your first?
• What feature do you consider to be the most important for an abstract language to support efficiently - and which features have you found to be most poorly implemented in lisp distributions?

I'd love to hear about what people think sucks about lisp and needs improvement - or can't be improved, so far I haven't found anything that I could complain about, the most difficult thing for me has been managing all the documentation on a half-century old language in the process of learning it. I've begun to love working in lisp, but I suppose being surrounded by a group so full of passion for it has helped contribute to my bias - if I'm wrong, help snap me out of it with a good argument against using lisp. ;)

KMP: I knew FORTRAN and Basic before I learned Lisp. And I've dealt with numerous languages of all kinds since learning Lisp. With most, the syntax itself is generally not a burden. Some languages have more pleasant syntaxes than others, but the human brain has an amazing ability to cope. Of all the many languages and syntaxes I've seen, about the only thing I've never been able to cope with is the "*" used to notate indirection in C. I understand thoroughly the notion of pointer indirection, and the difference between "pointer to array" and "array of pointers", but I find it forever hard to read and write that particular awful notation for some reason. Give me Teco or Perl any day.

Mostly, though, I think the issue of how hard a syntax makes it to learn a language is overblown. Humans have brains that are adapted to processing myriad special cases and can mostly cope with obscure syntaxes. The real issue is how hard it is for humans to pass on their knowledge to programs. People are good at judgment, and programs are good at repetition. Over time, though, judgment tasks become repetitive and it's time for programs to take them over. I like to write macros to package up things I do a lot, and the key to that is having a reliable mapping between program syntax and program structure. The last thing one wants is a macro language based on character syntax, since such syntax is too unpredictable. Lisp offers macros based on program structure, and that greatly reduces the number of programmer errors one makes in macro writing.

As to debugging, I try to use non-lisp code as little as possible because of how hard it is to debug. Most other languages don't have good visual representations of their data, so when I get in the debugger, the manner in which I am presented with errant data is usually low-level and hard to read. A great deal of my valuable time is spent painstakingly piecing structure back together. But in Lisp data objects have familiar visual representations and I find it's usually easier to see what has gone wrong.

What language took me the most time to learn? Probably Teco. There was a lot of trivia to learn there. What language took the least time? Probably FORTRAN, BASIC, Lisp, HyperTalk, and MOO. Fortran just because it was small. The others because they are highly interactive, which is a huge boon to learning.

Actually, I learned PostScript very fast, too. There are some excellent cookbooks on this. But I never learned to debug PostScript. When my programs erred, I mostly just wrote them anew and hoped they'd work then because debugging was too painful.

What do I consider it most important for an abstract language to support efficiently? My time. Time is the only true, non-renewable commodity. I eschew languages like C because they often waste enormous amounts of my time trying to develop and debug programs, and justify it on the basis of micro-differences in speed that have just never ended up mattering to me. I regard C as appropriate for use as an assembly language, but it doesn't provide enough high-level services for me. When I'm old and grey and look back on my life, I want to have done a lot of interesting things, not just have done a few interesting things but "boy were they fast".

I think it's important to pick a language not on the basis of how fast its implementations are today, but on the basis of how much they do what you want. Lisp has an undeserved reputation for being slow, which I think results from deciding to make it do things that there are not always known optimizations for at the outset. Like garbage collection. But as Lisp is used, people complain about the things that are slow, and fixes get found. So Lisp moves ahead. If Lisp had started instead only with the things it knew how to implement efficiently, it would be holding things back. I want my ideas to lead my technology and my tools, not to have my technology and tools leading my ideas.

9) Basis set for programming languages?
by PseudonymousCoward

As a Scheme and Common Lisp programmer, I got excited when I heard that the Java Virtual Machine would have automatic memory allocation and garbage collection. I thought it would be possible to build Lispish languages to run on the JVM. The rate at which Kawa has been developed, to implement a near-Scheme on the JVM has been frustrating to me. I attribute this at least in part to the absence in the JVM of a construct equivalent to Scheme's continuations. Do you think it is feasible to establish a "basis set" of programming language concepts on which all programming languages could be built, so that the distinctions between C, Scheme, etc would be "merely" syntactic? If yes, please enumerate your candidate set.

KMP: Well, continuations are just functions. What's really lacking to make this easier is good tail call support so that continuations can be called correctly without pushing stack.

I don't really have personal experience with using the JVM directly, but my experience with the MOO programming language led me to believe that there might be a problem with integrating tail calling and security, since sometimes security is implemented by asking "who called me?" and tail calls can mean that the apparent caller is not the real caller. So I asked my spies at Sun about this.

I'm told that the original security model for Java worked the way I expected (by examining the call chain), and that concern over consequent security matters contributed to the absence of tail calling support in early releases. But apparently it was conceded a long time ago that such support should be added some day, and that day simply hasn't come yet. So perhaps there is hope.

Even so, I'm not so sure no matter how hard you try that you can just paper over the many differences between languages and say that the only remaining issues are ones of syntax. I do think you can probably get to a point where all languages can compile to this machine, but that may not always mean that programs in one language are as efficient as those in another, or that data structures in one language are as naturally represented as those in another. For example, both Lisp and Scheme assume that small integers (that would fit in a machine number) are still integers; they don't have the int/Integer disjointness that Java has. A Lisp-to-JVM compiler could presumably hide this distinction, but it would be wrong to say that the only difference between Java and Lisp was syntax--there are really some material philosophical disagreements between the two languages.

10) Scheme as an XML Translation Language
by Evangelion

I've become fairly interested lately in using Scheme (probably mzscheme) and the SXML package as a way to do arbitrary XML translations in my free time (if I had any).

From the looks of it, the ability to create a reflexive mapping between an arbitrary XML document and an interpretable programming language is too powerful to be ignored.

Do you think that in the future one of the primary roles of Scheme/Lisp is going to be in manipulation of XML documents, or is this going to be relegated as an academic curiosity while the world struggles through parsing XML in Java?

KMP: Are those my only two choices? The second one sounds awfully bleak. I'd better choose the former.

I don't know whether you'll see XML as a formal part of either Lisp or Scheme any time in the near future, but a lot of that is because the standards bodies administering these are not extraordinarily active at this time. That doesn't mean the languages are dead, just stable. Ongoing work is mostly happening at the level of libraries, and such libraries can generally be written by anyone using existing primitives, without modifications to the core language.

Lisp manipulation of XML and HTML is something people have been working on for a long time. For example, the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) was a purely functional, side-effect free variant of Scheme. Even XSL, the apparent replacement to DSSSL, offers the same kind of functionality. It just uses a more CSS-like page model and XML syntax. But, conceptually, it's Scheme inside.

In my recent professional life, I have personally written several XML parsers, all in Lisp, for various employers and most recently for myself and my fledgling company. My company's implementation is not available on the market yet, but when it is, I'm quite sure the chief competition will not be around the availability of mere "availability". Already there are a variety of libraries related to XML, XSL, and SAX floating around. And I'm quite sure there will be more to come. Competition will be over things like efficiency, robustness, representation, and optional additional features.

11) Lisp vs. the world
by hjs

What do you see as the unique strengths and weaknesses of Lisp?

What strengths does it specifically have over other functional languages (such as ML), over structured languages (such as C, Algol, etc), over object oriented languages (such as C++, smalltalk, simula, etc), and over scripting languages (such as TCL, perl, etc)? Can these other languages or classes of languages be enhanced to include these strengths? If so, how, and if not, why?

What about weaknesses? What do you see as the weaknesses of Lisp, both in general and in comparison to the above classes of languages? Can these weaknesses be eliminated? If so, how and if not, why?

I mean strengths and weaknesses not only in the formal sense of the language itself, but also in terms of its usability in today's world. For example, difficulty in delivering binaries or lack of accessibility of system libraries from within common implementations of a language would be considered weaknesses.

KMP: There are so many things I like about Lisp, but most of them come under the heading of "doing things in the right order."

For example, type declarations in many languages are required but in Lisp they're optional. I prefer to first get my program working, and only then to tune it to be more efficient by adding type declarations. What's the point of doing a lot of make-work declarations if you're not even sure you're going to keep the result? I do a lot of exploratory programming just to answer "what if" questions. I also write lots of little throwaway programs just to compute a simple result. I don't need such programs to run in 5 microseconds instead of 10.

I also view the process of programming as a series of "times" at which decisions can be made: "coding time," "parsing time" (Lisp calls this "read time"), "macro expansion time," "compilation time," "load time," and "execution time." Lisp gives me a great deal more control for each piece of code as to when it runs, so that it can run at the appropriate time when the data it depends on is known. Other languages, especially statically typed ones, often make me specify information too soon, before it is really known, which usually means "making up" answers instead of really knowing the answers. Sometimes that makes programs run faster. Sometimes it just makes them run wrong.

And I like Lisp's willingness to represent itself. People often explain this as its ability to represent itself, but I think that's wrong. Most languages are capable of representing themselves, but they simply don't have the will to. Lisp programs are represented by lists and programmers are aware of that. It wouldn't matter if it had been arrays. It does matter that it's program structure that is represented, and not character syntax, but beyond that the choice is pretty arbitrary. It's not important that the representation be the Right® choice. It's just important that it be a common, agreed-upon choice so that there can be a rich community of program-manipulating programs that "do trade" in this common representation.

I write a lot of macros because there are a lot of interesting things one can do with macros in Lisp. In other languages, macro-writing is a process of manipulating strings containing input syntax. That feels very unreliable and I've never liked that. Lisp's willingness to represent its code in known data structures makes macro writing feel a lot more reliable. And the presence of macros in Lisp generally means that the boring parts of coding get removed, because repetitive patterns usually get captured by a macro and hidden away, keeping the developer's attention on the "interesting parts", and making the activity of programming itself both more fun and more efficient.

Could other languages borrow some of Lisp's strengths? Sure. And they do. Java, Dylan, and I suspect even C++ have all borrowed ideas from Lisp. But that's ok. We'll make more. And anyway, it's not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits when there's this kind of cross-pollination, whether it's Lisp influencing other languages or vice versa.

Weaknesses of the language? Well, that's harder to say. I think the basic design is quite strong. Sometimes you see an implementation that has put more energy into some parts of the language than others, but usually that has created a market opportunity for another, so overall we have our bases covered.

For example, you might find some implementations that have big "hello world" footprint sizes compared to "hello world" in other languages. Some in the Lisp community, don't think this matters much, because disk and RAM are getting ever cheaper. "Real" applications (i.e., not "hello world," but something meaty) of 5-10 megabytes are pretty commonplace these days. Years ago, Lisp used to be seen as large, but due to such criticism, Lisp has held its size constant in the last decade while other languages and systems have bloated rapidly. So nowadays, Lisp is comparatively quite small. And even still, if you don't like the size you get from one vendor, it seems there's always another trying to squeeze into the niche of addressing your need. Corman Common Lisp (an up-and-coming commercial implementation) and CLISP (a GPL-style "free" implementation) have given special attention to this issue. So there's a vendor for everyone on the size issue. And, though I deal more often in Common Lisp in my day-to-day work these days, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that image size is also a key concern of the Scheme language community, so that's yet another way the size issue is addressed for those who see it as critical.

Some might have heard that Lisp, being dynamic, doesn't make use of static type information. This isn't quite right. In fact, the language doesn't require static type analysis, it merely permits it. This gives a lot of leeway to each implementation to address the specific needs of its own customer base. The CMU Common Lisp implementation has, for example, addressed the issue of type analysis in great detail and offered a clear demonstration that there are many exciting things that implementations of Common Lisp can do with type declarations if they choose to.

Why don't all implementations optimize all of these aspects--footprint size, static type analysis, etc.? The Common Lisp language is admittedly conceptually large and correct, efficient compilation requires considerable time and cleverness to implement. "Why not make the language smaller so it requires less work to implement?" is a query you hear a lot from the outside, and even from members of the Scheme community. The answer from the Common Lisp community amounts to this: Programs are written all the time, but implementations are written much more rarely. What the implementation does not do is left for the user. The more hard work the language does, the less hard work programs do. In effect, the thesis of Common Lisp is that bigger languages make for smaller sentences in the language. (To see that there is at least some intuitive basis for this, think about how long a novel like Gone With the Wind is in English, then try to imagine whether the same novel re-expressed in Esperanto would be longer or shorter.)

If a language offers only what a programmer could implement overnight, it gives its programmers not much of a leg up on their final application. Many members of the Scheme community boast that they have written a Scheme implementation, while many Common Lisp programmers have not. Common Lisp is surely harder to implement, but the Common Lisp community does not see as its primary purpose to put out legions of implementors, each with their own easily-created implementation. The Common Lisp community has chosen to be about commercial applications, and its designers have provided a "meaty chunk" of useful power for programmers to use, with the promise that if programmers write their programs to that standard, not only will those programs work well today, but as implementations get better, those same programs will work even better tomorrow.

[to be continued...]

Good to see Lisp is still around.

As long as these languages are kept alive by their dedicated users, there is always the chance that the suits will see the light, and go for the productivity gains offered by high level languages.

I have never recovered from learning Smalltalk as a postgraduate, and then being forced to take a job programming in C++ because corporations are so far behind the times.

I look forward to the day when programmers in large corporations are able to use high level languages such as lisp, scheme and smalltalk instead of the current crop of low level languages like C++ Java and Perl.

Re:developers need to see the light, not suits

And try parallel programing with lisp. There simply isn't such a thing. Sad, sad.

When you grow tired of sticking your head in the sand, have a look at ITA's [itasoftware.com] website. They make the software that powers Orbitz's [orbitz.com] web site. If this is not an impressive testament to Common Lisp's ability to do industrial strength parallel programming, I'm not sure what would satisfy you.

You are correct that Common Lisp lacks a standard definition of parallel programming constructs, and thus parallel programs must use vendor-specific extensions. (There are some efforts to abstract over the differences.) In this regard, Common Lisp seems in the same boat as most other languages.

More Lisp

I wish that lisp was focussed on more in CS curriculum. It has far more potential in the future for doing useful things, as opposed to just doing things fast (java).

Re:More Lisp

Beautifully, MIT's "intro" freshman CS class, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [mit.edu] is taught in Scheme.

There as been a significant amount of pressure (from both non-CS administration and some CS-because-it-pays-well,-not-because-I-want-to-lea rn students) to change to Java or some other "real world" language, but thankfully, the instructors haven't given in.

The differentiation between good programmers and bad, isn't in the number of languages they "know." Programming is a methodology, and Lisp/Scheme is a great tool to teach it.

kilohyperlinks

Whoa. I don't think I've ever seen that before. Or a document where the number of links could be described in that fashion. "Megahyperlinks" sounds cool, though. I wonder if there are any of those around.

My god....

I think I may have just found most verbose man ever. I'm awed by the miniscule size of my scrollbar, and there are hardly any comments! This is ridiculously incredible.

Ah, LISP fanaticism

It's been a long time since I've encountered a LISP fanatic. I thought they were extinct.

I've written about 10,000 lines of LISP myself, know John McCarthy (who finally retired last week) and even used a Symbolics refrigerator at one point, but realistically, LISP is an idea whose time has passed.

Representing programs as S-expressions, incidentally, has one terrible cost - it's hostile to comments. Because there's no place to hang the comments, LISP code tends to be uncommented within the text of the code.

He has a good point, though, that while LISP used to be considered a big language, the other languages have bloated so much in the last decade that LISP now looks small.

Lisp commenting.

Comments are easily placed in Lisp code. And also, there is a way to embed documentation into functions and some other objects via the documentation string feature. This allows information about a function to be dynamically retrieved. The following illustrates how comments are written in the predominant Lisp code formatting style:

;;;
;;; This function computes the factorial of its
;;; argument x. The argument must be a
;;; non-negative integer. If the argument is 0
;;; or 1, the result is 1. Otherwise the result
;;; is the product (x)(x-1)(x-2) ... 2.
;;;

(defun fact (x) "Computes the factorial function"
(case x

;; if n is zero or 1, return 1
((0 1) 1)

;; otherwise compute factorial recursively
(otherwise (* x (fact (1- x))))))

The comp.lang.lisp FAQ has a few pointers on style, including use of whitespace, comment placement, how many semicolons to use for what comments and the like.

C takes too long to write?

I don't know what planet he's from but, in general, C does not take long to write. C has this wonderful capibility called functions, and if you do a lot of repetitive work, you can write a function to do that repetitive work. Or, for example, in C++ you can pass a class of C++ functions and data as an argument, making it so that modular applications can pass the same code and data to all available functions for immediate use..

IMHO, he's just biased to Lisp, and I'm just biased to C. But, outright saying that C programmers are a bunch of speed-freak-holier-than-thou losers, was going a little far..

Re:C takes too long to write?

Firstly, I'm a much more experienced C programmer than a Lisp programmer. Yet, the limitations of C compared to Lisp are painfully obvious to me.

Yes, C supports the fundamental unit of program abstraction known as the function. But that does not make up for the various other drawbacks.

Why C takes longer to write is because the programmer must deal with every detail of the computation---other than some machine-specific details such as allocating values to machine registers, explicitly managing the passing of parameters, or manually scaling pointer displacements based on types.

Firstly, there is the memory management. Every significantly large C program which uses dynamic memory, unless it is correctly written by a miraculous fluke, will suffer from failures due to premature deallocation of memory and memory leaks. It's not possible to create a significant data abstraction of C without encumbering it with memory management burden. A typical abstract datatype (ADT) module will have create and destroy functions which call malloc and free. The user of these functions inherits all of the responsibility that comes with malloc and free: the avoidance of premature deallocations and concerns about leaks. There are many things you can't do effectively without a garbage collector: the entire technique of functional programming is made impractically difficult. When you don't have to worry about memory allocation, you gain productivity.

Secondly, there is the strict, static type system. Static type systems get in the way of certain types of programming. Here is an example. It's not unusual for parsers written in C to use a union type to represent the items stored in a parse tree, and to use integer tags to identify what is present. What is that, if not an emulation of dynamic typing?

This brings us to my last point. Compiler writing is incorporated into the Lisp programming style, and the dynamic typing supports it directly. In Lisp, in addition to the use of functions as an abstraction mechanism, you have macros. These are not like C macros which work with tokens of the program text; they are operators that work on data structures; data structures which typically represent some programming construct and are translated into some other data structure, which represents Lisp code that will be substituted for the macro and evaluated in its place.

The techniques for abstraction provided by Lisp macros are squarely out of reach of the programmer working in C, who is stuck with a fixed set of langauge features, and a lame preprocessor that can perform some very simplistic emulations of new language features.

What if you want to embed a whole new language in C? You have to write an external processor that works with the raw text of your source code. This is exemplified by ``embedded SQL''.

Learning Lisp/Scheme?

Anyone have any good docs/books they used to learn lisp/scheme quickly and easily (more than just an amazon/google search)?

Doesn't Lisp have a foundation in AI? Or is that Prolog? Doesn't Lisp somehow have a relationship to prolog?

AHH!!!!!

I have never seen LISP before, now that I have, I have a very strong respect for those that can actual think in the the LISP way........

how can you write a math formula like that!!!!
my brain hurts......

Lisp Not Hard

I learned CLISP during my last semester of College in my AI class(to ('01 Jan) ('01 May)) [Jan '01 to May '01]. I did not think it was all bad, the worst was making sure you have the right amount of ()'s matching.. This was solved with the ALMIGHTY VIM!! This handy editor color coded my code and made working in files a snap, also with the % command to see matching ()'s.

Just My CS 2 cents.

MOO!

If I'd known you programmed in MOO, I'd have asked: what's your character name on LambdaMOO?

Anyway, implementing tail calling in MOO isn't as bad as it sounds, and for a trivial case of it, I implemented it. You do lose most of callers(), and thus have less meaningful tracebacks, but I just keep the last frame for caller and caller_perms(). The only thing that permanently breaks is callers() based security like @gag and @refuse, but I implemented a "taint" mechanism (in-db, could easily have been done in-server) that just held the set of perms used. gag_p was then a simple matter of $set_utils:intersection(this.gaglist, permset)

Sometimes wish I still had my old MOO code, but I gave up on MOO long ago after seeing that it just wasn't going to get anywhere. Shame I don't see any real languages anymore with integrated security like MOO had.

Comparison with ML/OCaml

I would love to hear Kent Pittman compare Lisp with the growing interest in quasi-functional languages such as ML and especially OCaml.

These languages give up the s-expression syntax, and thus the powerful Lisp macro facility which people like Paul Graham believe to be critical to high-end Lisp programming.

What they offer in return is static type checking, which has saved me countless hours of bug hunting, and some wonderful mechanisms for abstraction and code clarification: sum types, modules, functors, and exceptions.

I used to do all my work in Lisp/Scheme. And occasionally I miss the simple clarity of the s-expression syntax and the macros. But these days I do everything in OCaml and have been amazed at the ease with which conceptual structures become code.

Lisp/Scheme implementation

Here @ NEU, some professors are part of 'TeachScheme', which is an effort to push Scheme into CS curricula. They have actually put togeather a scheme implementation, DrScheme, which provides an excellent interactive environment for writing and learning scheme http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/drscheme/ [rice.edu] Oh, and it's GPL too. runs on Mac/Windows/linux.

syntax nothing to be proud of

The thing I personally like about (+ (* 2 y) x) rather than 2*y+x is that it simplifies my editing.

Abd then bragging about how easy it is to write editor macros to manipulate expressions? some of the examples ended in lines like:

(string &lt (first-name name1) (first-name name2)))))))


Crapping closing parens like that makes the language difficult to read without a text editor for matching. And it hurts my eyes ;-).

Closing parenthesis placement vs. readability.

The truth of the matter is that the closing parentheses don't matter one bit. What programmers read is the indentation. This is true across programming languages. Whether you are working in Lisp, Python or C, you use whitespace clues to determine program structure (in the case of Python, the language sees it the same way).

If a C program is properly formatted using one of the popular styles, then you can remove all of the braces and its meaning is still obvious; you can put the braces back automatically, or nearly so.

I've experimented with a C formatting style in which closing braces are stacked like in Lisp, and it didn't make one bit of difference to the readability of the code.

In a way, the closing brackets, braces or parentheses are for the compiler, not for the reader; the programmer simply has to ensure that they balance.

In some implementations of Lisp long ago, there was feature known as superbrace. If you wrote a right square bracket, it would close all outstanding open parentheses. I think there was one additional rule; the superbrace closing would stop upon encountering a matching open right bracket.

So you could write something like:

(defun hello() [let (foo bar) (a (b] ((c d(e)]

The first ] will properly close the outstanding parentheses all the way back to the [let. The second one will balance back to the (defun.

The superbrace did not catch on; it's not part of modern Lisp. That's could be because programmers simply didn't perceive enough of a benefit from the feature.

If Lisp is so great, why isn't it more popular

Long ago and far away, I programmed on an Xerox Lisp Machine (Dandelion) for several years and immensely enjoyed it, so my comments are intended to be friendly rather than hostile.

While weak typing and dynamic scoping are great for some things, it really trips up a lot of beginner programmers. An alternative Lisp that requires declarations might be very helpful for beginners. For strongly typed languages, compilers are a major help in debugging.

I would agree that other languages have become huge, I think the problem is that Lisp is a big and idiosyncratic language. Some things are in Lisp because of tradition. Some more things are in Lisp because they were grafted on top of the tradition. Then you have exceptions such as macros that violate the usual rules. It is true that Java is also huge, but each object in the API follows a very restricted syntax.

CLOS has all sorts of interesting things in it such as multiple inheritance and methods for combinations of objects. These are very nice once you have learned to use them, but there are lots of pitfalls, too.

I guess this means Lisp is a power tool for those who have learned how to use it. But it is difficult to learn, and unfortunately, a widely-used and widely-understood (more or less) language needs to appeal more to the lowest common denominator rather than only to those that get it.

operator*() velocity vector

The author's comment about the use of the * syntax in C to mean indirection immediately recalled his comments about different communities having different velocity vectors for the same constructs.

C++ manages to distinguish itself by having multiple velocity vectors for a single construct. The technical term for this is multiparadigm. It means: a furball of vectors all pointing in different directions.

In the generic phase space, operator*() no longer means indirection. It roughly means "evaluate iterator in default expression context".

vector<pair<int,double> > V;
for (vecpairiter a = V.begin(); a != V.end(); ++a) {
if (a->first == 42) {
meaning += a->second;
*a = pair<int,double>(0, 0.0);
}
}

Here operator->() is used to perform a non-default evaluation.

typedef vector<Object> Vobj;
typedef Vecobj::iterator Vobjiter;
typedef vector<Vecobjiter> VVobj;
typedef VVobj::iterator VVobjiter;
for (Vobjiter a = V.begin(); a != V.end(); ++a) {
for (VVobjiter b = a->begin(); b != a->end(); ++b) {
cout << *b << '\n';
}
}

Care to re-evaluate whether the human mind is really all that good at coping with ugly syntax?

The point of this example is that iterators themselves are first class objects. You assign, compare, modify these just like any other object. An iterator does not stand in for the object(s) it is capable of accessing.

If you did make it stand in for the object (bottom of indirection chain) you would still need a notation for dereferencing N levels from the top (regardless of the depth of the composition), otherwise iterator composition won't work.

I guess it would look like this:
a // value of fully dereferenced chain
^a // iterator at top of chain
*^a // one level dereference from top
**^a // two levels dereference from top

That cracks me up. STL programmers spend more time manipulating iterators than they do manipulating the base objects.

The only syntax I've never been able to swallow is Pascal's use of ^ to get me back to the thing I was really thinking about: getting the iteration correct.

the first time I saw lisp I said...

...aAAAAAAAah MY EYES, THEY BURN!!!!
I get from this article the following:
1)you should use lisp because its emacs friendly.
2)we use notation thats different then what mathmaticians use, but is better
3)Lisp programmer feel that speed is un-important because there is enough processor speed. (that little comment made me want to put my fist through my monitor) clearly not made by an engineer.
4)bracket intense sphagetti code is a good thing.
5)old guys can be even more fanatical about an obscure language then 'lee7 w4rez d00dz'
6)its bad that the most powerfully, rich, and technological nation on the planet had a cultural influence on the computer industry.
7)LAMBDA is just a way to maintain lisp leetness

Real reason for all the ()s

Pitman mentions that all the ()s in Lisp make it easier to edit and help avoid problems with operator precedence. This true, but beside the point - the real reason behind the "program is data" paradigm is the amazing thing called Lisp macros.

Most production-level Lisp programs may well never encounter a single list during their execution. Hashtables, structures and arrays are all primitive types in Common Lisp, and CLOS lets you build multiply-inheriting object classes to your heart's desire. But these programs will all still be lists. This means that you can use LISP's list-processing tools to write and rewrite them.

Which is where macros come in. Unlike other languages, Lisp macros are not just a simple preprocessor. They put the entire language at your disposal in constructing the expressions you want. Hence you can add new control constructs to the language - with 5 lines of code you can add a for, as in (for (x 1 10) (print x)). You can introduce new tools for updating generalized variables - (setf (aref a n) x) and (setf (property object) v) are equivalent to a[n]=x and object.property=v, but what about a user-defined (setf (min l) n) that changes all values in l smaller than n to n, thereby enforcing the identity? You can even embed entire languages on top of Lisp, and write your programs in that. And because this is all handled at compile time, not only will you not incur the cost associated with using high-level interfaces, you could also use this opportunity to perform extra computation while compiling, based on values potentially already known.

The most obvious analogy is to XML. It too obeys the "program is data" paradigm and has delimiters everywhere (though its are more verbose). This means you can rewrite your XML content using the XSLT stylesheets, which themselves are XML documents and hence can be rewritten too. The main difference here is that XSLT is nowhere near as well equipped to deal with language rewriting as Lisp is (ever tried even a simple recurse across more than one axis?).

Lisp is like boot camp

I first encountered Lisp (MacLisp I think) in the early 80s in a course I took at the University of Illinois. We had to use the Lisp 1.5 Manual by McCarthy. A thin text that was terse as hell and made a tough task (learning lisp) even harder. I even read a review by E. Dijkstra of the book and he was critical of it (but he hates everything.)

Anyway I've come to the conclusion that Lisp is very tough and a lot of hard work. Just like boot camp in the marines! But just like a boot camp experience don't you notice that everyone who makes it through the torture claims it was the best experience in their lives? They have to justify the pain. I think there is a psychology term for that.

Anyone can learn Lisp but it might take more effort than one's previous efforts in learning computer science. Dont give up!

I'd like to add that the interview was quite thoughtful. A lot of time went into it. It was a very good read.

The Largest Disservice to LISP

...is most frequently done whenever a LISP advocate opens his/her mouth. LISP advocates have been, in my limited and biased experience, some of the most arrogant and condescending bastards in the world. They think that LISP is God's gift to everything and that anyone who doesn't know it is an ignorant dolt. I know that is a harsh criticism of LISP advocates, but I think it's a well-placed criticism. I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as, "LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world" and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard a Java, C++, C, Perl, or Python advocate make the same claim about their own language of choice. I have heard such claims from Philip Greenspun (LISP and Emacs advocate), who also wrote (paraphrased) about Perl: "Perl has 1/10,000th the power of Common LISP, and 1/1,000th the power of FORTRAN."

This article by Pitman, however, is more level-headed, and I appreciate that. It's nice to hear a LISP advocate describe and defend rather than criticize and condemn. The main reason I have stayed away from LISP (and Emacs and OpenBSD, for that matter) is because I don't want to be associated with the people who support it. Someone may say I'm a moron for boycotting those things for such a "lame" reason, but, then again, is it really such a lame reason? What, exactly, am I missing out on by not participating in LISP, Emacs, and OpenBSD? I can tell you that I'm missing out on cavorting with condescending, arrogant pricks, for one thing. My computing needs are served quite adequately without those technologies.

I think it would be good for the LISP (and Emacs and OpenBSD) community to realize that they will win many more converts to their cause if they drop the arrogance.

Why Lisp? .... CLOS

Say no more:

• Multiple inheritance scheme
• Polymorphic methods - multiple arguments from different classes
• Method combination - control order of method execution
• Class conflict resolution - use precedence lists or even combinations
• Generic function calls and message passing
• Run-time class redefinition and instance updating
• The Meta-Object Protocol

system interface

i like Lisp, but at my startup we're still using C, and not for speed, or (lack of) ease of use/debugging. It's because C gives you a handle on the machine. The (lack of) system interfaces in Lisp is a big problem.

For instance (and this is why we didn't use Perl, cuz at the time (now?) it's threads were buggy) we need to be able to use threads.

Maybe this is because Unix is written in C, not Lisp, but i think the Lisp community needs a little less "people don't use Lisp because they are stupid/lazy/afraid of change/old/don't get it" and more "why aren't people _really_ using Lisp?"

Scheme on JVM (Kawa)

PseudonymousCoward in question 9 says: The rate at which Kawa has been developed, to implement a near-Scheme on the JVM has been frustrating to me.

I think you're asking a lot. Kawa has over 80k lines of code (as measured by wc), almost all of it written by one person (me) not working on it full-time, and much of it re-written as I improve things. That is a lot of code. Kawa includes a full compiler and a big runtime with lots of features. I get lots of compliments.

I attribute this at least in part to the absence in the JVM of a construct equivalent to Scheme's continuations.

In principle it is not that difficult to implement continuations on the JVM. Once you have full tail-call support (which Kawa does), you can implement continuations by a source-level transformation. What has mainly held me back is the desire to do it right, by which I mainly mean efficiently, building on top of the right calling conventions, and with interoperability with "direct" code. The other thing is I have never seen continuations as all that important. It's a check-off item if you want to claim to implement Scheme, but I suspect very few people actually would be able to use them. Still for those that do, I will get around to it as soon as I can.

ANSI CL and the Lisp machine killed Lisp

Lisp is great: a simply syntax, powerful semantics, and an extensible environment. Unfortunately, ANSI CL and the Lisp machine killed it. Why?

Lisp machines were expensive workstations that cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver performance that, even at the time, could easily be had for a few thousand dollars. Contrary to popular claims, the programming environment has some serious limitations, including lack of source level debugging (eventually it got added, but only after the system had already fallen from grace). Those systems simply were not competitive and gave Lisp a reputation of requiring gold plated hardware, carried over into hugely expensive development and runtime licenses. And the use of those machines also kept Lisp from ever integrating well into mainstream environments.

An even bigger problem with Lisp was ANSI CommonLisp. ANSI CommonLisp failed to standardize some really important functionality, like threads, reflection, and networking. What it did specify it specified poorly: the meaning of type declarations and conditions (exceptions) is still vague. The upshot is that CommonLisp programs are a pain to port and require careful hand-tuning for each implementation. A program that runs fast on one implementation runs like molasses on another.

The most frequently named "issues" with Lisp never were issues as far as I can tell. People who put up with Perl syntax should have no problem putting up with Lisp syntax. And performance and resource requirements of Lisp implementations are small compared to Java or even modern scripting languages.

So, where is Lisp going? CMU CommonLisp is trying valiantly to maintain CommonLisp functionality and enhance it, but it is hampered by being based on a poorly written Lisp standard. Python actually gives you most of the power and convenience of Lisp but integrates much more nicely with its environment; Python's big drawback is the lack of good native code compilation. Java includes many Lisp features (Java was designed by people with a lot of Lisp experience) and it specifies reflection, runtime code generation, and exception handling much better than CommonLisp (too bad about the syntax, though). Scheme is probably the best variety of Lisp these days, and there are some really good implementations out there (Bigloo and PLT Scheme being some of them; Bigloo and Cygnus's Scheme compilers even compile to the JVM if you like). And the ML series of languages (SML, OCAML) give you most of the convenience of Lisp with full type checking and no type declarations.

Lisp continues to live in many forms, despite the Lisp machine and despite ANSI CommonLisp.

What about currying?

Something that I've been dying to ask someone in the LISP pantheon...

What's the deal with the apparent lack of support for currying. More purist functional languages support currying (but unfortunately often also force you to declare types) so why not LISP?

Why doesn't any LISP folklore I've seen not discuss (the lack of) this feature?

Ian

evaluation order

Kent's comments about arbitrary parentheses stuck in the back of my mind all day until suddenly the bubble burst.

r = (a/b)/(c/d);

How does Kent think I _should_ paren that?

r = a/b/(c/d); ???

Even if that's still correct, only a supreme wanker would write it that way.

Now lets get more technical. All variables are floats.

r = a+b+c;

In C/C++ the compiler gets to choose the evaluation order. Results might not be the same in the low precision

r = (a+b)+c;

Think you were clever? Wrong. In C/C++ the compiler is still free to reorder evaluation. Who thinks up these crazy rules?

temp = a+b;
r = temp+c;

Finally the compiler takes your word for it.

In Lisp, if I write (* (/ x 42.0) 42.0) I guess the runtime environment is not allowed to remove the costly division.

Personally I think we need to get with the program and start using symbol sets with about twice as many grouping sets. One set of parens for phrasing, another to mandate a fixed evaluation order.

People often complain that overloading is one of the worst features of C++. I agree. But not the operator overloading. The worst feature of C++ is the syntactic overloading of () to define function argument lists as well as to supply arguments for a function call. Not to mention the use of >> as an operator when the angle brackets are sorely needed to denote template parameters.

The subject of delimiter sets runs far deeper than just making it easy for emacs to hop forward and backward when the human eye is jangled.

Thoughts from a toe-dipper

I've dabbled with different programming languages, and profess to be adequate at C, Perl and Bash (does shell programming count?). A few months ago I looked into Lisp, excited after reading a paper by Peter Norvig that talked about "powerful languages" and how some languages were inherently more powerful than others (he argued why he thought Lisp was one of the best).

So I bought a book on Lisp (ANSI Common Lisp), downloaded the Clisp implementation, and started playing around.

One of the first things I noticed (in its absence) was the lack of supporting libraries. Where were the libraries for socket programming, text processing, cryptography, etc? After some searching it was possible to locate some TCP/IP libraries (their lisp equivalents), but they didn't appear as solid as I would've hoped for.

Sidenote: I'm not saying they sucked, but the fact that you had to search for third party support of what I considered fundamental requirements of a language (at least for what I would've been using it for) was annoying.

The above issue, combined with the apparent esoteric nature of Lisp drove me towards Python instead.

A person like myself uses programming languages to accomplish tasks. I want to be able to do this quickly (rapid development) with minimal learning curve required. Languages such as Perl and Python are great for this kind of work. They've got a large community supporting it, socket and text processing operations are natively supported.

Few people are going to use Lisp when it takes a lot less effort to do the equivalent in another language, regardless of its "power". Lisp may have a place for specialised applications, but at least for internet-related apps, it will not be most people's first choice.

Cheers,
H-

Re:Scheme isn't dead? Then it should.

But anyway I think it's an archaic language (it was invented in the 50's if I recall) and like anything invented nearly 50 years ago in the computer world, something better has evolved from it or was either created from scratch in a better way.

Lisp has evolved. ANSI Common Lisp is a very different language then what was used in the 50's. It has been continously evolving for nearly half a century.

I hate the gazillions of parenthenses and especially the poor interface given to me by DrScheme (of course again there might be something better but it's our teacher's restriction).

Nearly all serious Lisp development is done in an Emacs-like editor that has built-in support for writing Lisp programs. This support includes facilities that make keeping paranthesis balanced trivial.

I also don't think the language would have survived if it was not supported by universities morons who just don't want it to die. Leave it be! It's time is over!

I'd highly recommend you go to www.lisp.org and look at the hundreds of huge commercial applications that have been written in Common Lisp. It is not an obscure research language: If Common Lisp was only used by ``universities morons,'' would 2 major vendors (www.franz.com, www.xanalys.com) be able to make money off it? Incidently, both the preceeding sites--especially www.franz.com--list commercial customers who have been satisfied with developing software in Common Lisp.

Anyway... speaking about speed. We had a small project of doing fractals and compared it to a c++ program and the scheme program took nearly 20 times than the c++ to do the same recursion level.

It's very important to note that Scheme is not Common Lisp. Scheme is a very different language: Scheme is about having an elegant tool to solve problems; Lisp is about having a tool to elegantly solve problems. In particular Common Lisp is typically compiled to native code and allows the programmer to include type declarations. These two features alone can improve speed by a couple orders of magnitude. To be fair, some Schemes support these features but, AFAIK, it's not standardized.

Re:Help me start learning

For one thing, Emacs uses elisp. Elisp is not the same as Common Lisp (or Scheme). Common Lisp has "write-line" and Scheme has "display". As for Emacs, well I don't think there is such a thing because it is integrated with a text editor (and has no terminal, or standard output).

I suggest getting CMU Common Lisp (CMUCL) or CLISP. Check out www.lisp.org.

Re:Scheme isn't dead? Then it should.

Maybe your teacher really is a moron, but you're sounding just like one of the many many people (myself included, once upon a time) who get upset with Scheme because it actually forces them to understand programming at a deep level as opposed to just banging out code that they only understand poorly. Ask yourself, if you can't hand-evaluate a program, how can you claim you know what it does? Maybe (probably) you're "fighting with the language" exactly because you don't understand this area as well as you cood. Particularly in Scheme, learning the semantics in detail is an extremely worthwhile exercise, as Scheme's semantics are very simple [thanks in part to those parentheses you hate so much]. Vague understandings of the semantics of any language lead to programs that you only vaguely understand, and that only work sorta-kinda. If you aspire to be that kind of programmer, quit now and do something else. And about your fractal program, I suspect that your Scheme algorithm was a worse algorithm than the C++ version. Newcomers to Scheme frequently do things like accidentally computing recursions more frequently than necessary, and if you're seeing that big a speed difference it's very likely that's what's going on. Also, DrScheme imposes a pretty big (constant factor) speed penalty itself due to all of the debugging support it provides. If you ran your program directly in MzScheme you'd gain significant speed savings, but nothing compared to optimizing the algorithm to remove inefficiencies.

Re:python v lisp

Hello world in python, at it's easiest, is print "hello, world"

How about (write-line "hello, world")?

Lispers feel the same way about about have Lots of InSpired Parentheses, if this makes any sense.

Re:Help me start learning

Emacs uses a quirky dialect of a rather ancient Lisp. If you want to learn Common Lisp, you will need to get a Lisp environment. I recommend CLISP [cons.org], due to its extreme portability, simple installation procedure (./configure; make; su; make install), and relatively friendly CLI when not used via an editor interface (tab completion mainly).

I recommend using ILISP [sourceforge.net] with Emacs. It integrates with most of the Lisp environments out there and provides some neat features such as sending the new version of your defun to Lisp, and a slightly buggy buffer-package-matching thingy. Here's the Common Lisp devel stuff in my ~/.emacs:

Well, I would have put it here, except that even with all the text below, the Slashdot lameness filter cens0rizes me. Email me if you're curious and I'll send you a copy.

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

[Sorry about this, but it looks as if I'll have to change the character ratios a bit...] Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

CHAPTER 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak* -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Re:GUI bindings for Lisp

The commercial Lisp implementations from Xanalys and Franz, at least, have bindings to proprietary GUI toolkits that are programmed at fairly high levels. The Xanalys toolkit is called CAPI, and is portable across Windows and Unix. There is also CLIM, which is a standardized, cross-platform, very high-level GUI system; this is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac. There is currently an effort to create a free implementation of this. There are others, but I haven't used them.

Re:GUI bindings for Lisp

There are several opportunities for Common Lisp. The commercial Lisps tend to come with decent GUI support. - Xanalys LispWorks comes with "CAPI" which is a portable (between OSes) Toolkit that uses the WinAPI on Windows and Motif on UNIX/Linux. - Franz Inc. AllegroCL comes with "Common Graphics" which is a Toolkit written for Windows - Digitools MCL comes with decent MacOS GUI support - Xanalys _and_ Franz _and_ Digitool offer implementations of "CLIM" (Common Lisp Interface Manager) a GUI Framework portable between OSes and Lispsystems Free GUI Toolkits (probably incomplete) - CLX is an implementation of the X Protocol in pure (!) Common Lisp (no binding to the C libs!). Therefore it runs on nearly every Lispsystem available. You need a X-Server to use Programs written with it, and the Toolkit is rather low-level. - CLM is a binding to Motif available for CMUCL and AFAIK some other systems. - Garnet is a rather extensive (but unfortunately not further developing) GUI Toolkit for several Systems - CLG and CL-GTK are Bindings to GTK for at least CMUCL - McCLIM is an effort to build a free implementation of CLIM (see above) which is developing rather quickly and looks very promising. Rationale: It is possible to use Toolkits like GTK or QT with Lisp, but there are several Problems with those: - Both GTK _and_ QT make sometimes stretch the image of what can be counted as easy portable C Interfaces (with QT offering until recently only a C++ interface) - GTK Does not look native on Windows, QT does but cannot be used commercially without paying license fees on Windows. - Simply writing bindings is not enough it will look like coding C in Lisp if there is no good layer above the low-level stuff. Therefore IMHO the right way for Common Lisp is to count on McCLIM getting _the_ OS and Lisp-System independent GUI Toolkit it deserves to be (with the possibility of having GTK, Motif, QT, WinAPI... as Backends)

Re:Correction

Actually, it'd be a lot more likely to give you an error, since define isn't a standard function in Common Lisp.

Re:Correction

This actually isn't quite true.

(define hello-world ()
"Hello, World!"))

seems to work, because when you call the function in the Lisp read-eval-print loop (that's the name for the prompt you get when you typically start a Lisp system) it evaluates it, and prints "Hello, World!" because that is the string that the function returned.

Typically, the read-eval-print loop is only used for programming development. A "Hello, World" program should write the string "Hello, World" to a stream, analoguous to doing a puts("Hello, World") in C. Thus, the example using WRITE-LINE is more correct.

The read-eval-print loop is one of the greatest features of Common Lisp development. It allows you to evaluate arbitrary bits and pieces of Lisp code and incrementally add and compile functions, methods, classes, etc. to your program. This means you can be building a (compiled) program without having to go through the write-compile-run-coredump-debug-repeat cycle.

It also makes debugging far easier, because you don't have to write nearly as much testing framework as you would in a more ``traditional'' compiled language. Often, testing a function is a matter of telling having the Lisp system you're using to compile it, and then calling the function on made-up arguments in the read-eval-print loop! This is so much nicer then having to write seperate programs to test your programs.

Python's missing Lisp's Macros; Java's missing Ace

What Python lacks that's extremely important to Lisp, is a macro facility.

String based macros like the C and C++ preprocessors are woefully inadequate. Representing code as data and transforming code with macros is essential to Lisp. Take macros and s-expressions away from Lisp, and you have Python. Take macros and gratuitous syntax away from C++, and you have Java.

Because of the syntax of languages like C, C++ and Java, there's no good way to design a macro language as powerful and easy to use as Lisp macros. The pointlessly ridiculous syntax of Perl make it impossible to implement Lisp-like macros for Perl in a meaningful way. The Byzantine parse-tree data structures required to represent the syntax of a Perl program are much too complex for macros to easily understand and transform.

Before he designed Java, James Gosling took a crack at the problem by designing and implementing a C macro language called "Ace".

Ace was a high level C parse tree macro transformation language, used to generate the low level raster-op code for the X11/NeWS server. The previous version of NeWS totally abused the C preprocessor in ways it wasn't designed to be used, in order to implement the low level high performance graphics code (a dark, unpleasant practice known as "macrology").

Gosling designed Ace in response to the problems and limitations of the C preprocessor, as he later designed Java in response to C++. You could give Ace several ways to implement loops like two dimensional raster operations, and it could different plug code into the middle of loops with different performance characteristics.

Commonly used rasterops could be expanded to different degrees, with many different cases separately coded (pulling the if statements to the outside and generating big fast code). Seldom used rasterops could be collapsed so the code was correct but compact (pushing the if statements inside of the loop and generating small slow code). Ace operated on the level of C parse trees, not text like C preprocessor macros. Ace would actually estimate the space/time tradeoffs, and decide how to expand macros according to the hints you gave it.

But Ace transformations were quite complex, special purpose and difficult to program. So James Gosling decided not to put macros into Java at all.

The success of Java proves that C and C++ preprocessor macros are not essential to those kinds of languages. But Lisp macros are vastly more powerful, and absolutely essential to Lisp.

Ace was an ambitious tour de force for a C macro language, but it was much too complex and unwieldy for Gosling to design into Java. But that kind of macro programming is actually quite commonplace and straightforward with Lisp.

-Don

Re:forth and lisp

This of course has already been done in Lisp, about 20 years ago.

So very, very lame all of this

No, here is the proper "Hello, world!" program file in LISP:

"Hello, world!"

That's about it. It's loaded and returned on the command line as a string output.

Re:()'s

Um, the strict stack nature of C keeps it from allowing a functional programming style in the same manner as Lisp. Just to prove it to yourself, you might try writing a function that takes one argument and returns a function of one argument that returns the product of its argument and the argument passed to the first function.