Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp

This one is just for the programmers out there. For a long time I've heard great and wonderous stories about what is possible with Lisp. Basically it's made to sound like all programming languages ideas were already fleshed out in the early 50's when John McCarthy created a language that defined languages (and no doubt implemented it on a machine he'd hacked together from a vacuum cleaner and a grinder organ).

When you look into it though it turns out that they're not exactly wrong. Bascially Lisp's design ignores hardware constraints and completely abstracts them away. As hardware becomes fast and cheap enough that it tends towards irrelevance (eg. think Java and memory) new programming languages tend towards Lisp. For example, Java borrows syntax from C but garbage collection and memory management from Lisp. Python takes runtime typing and lexical closures (a bit like function pointers), not to mention garbage collection too, to make itself cool.

Lisp has had all these, and a large standard library and some highly optimized implementations sincethe 1970's. The few studies comparing languages suggest Lisp programs when controlled for programmer skill tend to be slightly faster than C++ with memory consumption around that of Java. The programmer time required is less than in both the other languages.

Now I can't vouch for this myself yet I'm just starting to read the intros, but they look very interesting. To avoid having to keep mailing myelf the link I thought I'd blog it.

Pascal Costanza's guide is an interesting overview of all considerations with lots of useful links. One of those is to the free chapters of Paul Graham's introductory book, chapter two is especially easy to read and good at getting to the point. Of course, if you're acheap skate like me and you are interested enough to read more but don't want to pay, a full introductory book can be found online here.

So have a read if you're interested. If not, brace yourself for future Smug Lisp Weenie comments from yours truly when I've attained enlightenment and you've been left behind... :)

cf. SocialProblemsOfLisp:

It is often suggested that one of the SocialProblemsOfLisp is that LispUsersAreArrogant.

No, they're just perceived as arrogant by lesser beings.

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