The Roots Of Lisp


The article tries to explain us, as the previous readings the advantages of Lisp over other programming languages. The author explains how Lisp was created, the “idea behind the development of Lisp”. Also, the author argues how and why it’s so different to program in Lisp than in other languages. The author, divides the types of programming in two different fields, and puts as their principal exponents C and Lisp. He defines the C model as the most popular model, but he also argues that this kind of languages and their development hasn’t been evolving fast enough. It uses the example of the garbage collector to support this. In other hand, the author expose how Lisp have certain advantages as the capability to write programs to write another program.

Later the reading explores more the similarities between Lisp and Clojure (operators) and functions. The reading exposes how most of the functions and functionality of Lisp are still used by other languages, and this means that these are good ideas, that are tools or methods that really works, something that the new languages need to take in count as we the engineers need to do too. This doesn’t mean that Lisp is a perfect language, the language had been being modified through the years and have adopted new features and functionality.

Is interesting how the reading talks about certain points, the examples are easy to understand and complements perfectly what are we reading in other articles and the class book. It really makes me want to try Lisp and compare it with Clojure, this article makes me think that Lisp is as C and Clojure is like C++, and as I’ve already tried C and C++ and the functionality between them was very different. I want to compare and try by my own all the differences and changes between Lisp and Clojure

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The second part of the film is also interesting, this part explores at first how IBM realized that there was a new market rising, the market, of the personal computers. This part explains how IBM realized that they may lost all this rising and valuable market if they didn’t quickly develop a product to compete with Apple and the other little personal computer manufacturers. So, they decided to take advantage of their resources and bought as many as possible components to construct a computer, but they still had another problem, the Operating System. IBM decided to make a kind of outsourcing hiring Microsoft to develop this OS, but they weren’t their first option, at first, they tried to hire and bought another OS, but for some inconvenient they ended hiring Microsoft and earning the rights for the programming language that Microsoft (Bill Gates) developed, and, they obtained their OS.  It was a matter of time for Microsoft to realize that the business relationship with IBM wa...
Leer más

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

At the beginning, Dick told us his background, and it surprised to me, that he said he have some mathematical degrees and one in artificial intelligence, because last semester at my algorithm’s analysis class our professor Salvador E. Venegas said us that something beneficial for an engineer was, to “get the full package”, because there was always engineers that need to study mathematics in order to advance in their jobs, because the understanding of mathematics reduced the complexity of developing algorithms. I didn’t know Lisp has an interpreter instead of a compiler, something interesting because as I know it reads and traduce the program line per line, instead like the hole program first, as the compiler do. I didn’t understand well how the meta part of “eval” work, what I understood was that “eval” work in certain way as recursion. The “common Lisp” is interesting, how Lisp started to get “subdivisions” in different ways to get closer to user’s needs gave Lisp variety and trying ...
Leer más

Rich Hickey on Clojure

Clojure’s design is to be hosted, this caught my attention, because as it was explained at the previous podcast, the Yahoo Store was designed in Lisp, so, this makes of Clojure a good option to develop embed systems as I see. Lisp’s compiler doesn’t compile text, it compiles data structures, I still didn’t understand how Clojure can compile, read or execute code at the “same time” but it seems that the work with data structures is the key to make this posible. In Clojure, programming and metaprogramming are the same thing.  Macros in Clojure and Lisp are simple data structure processing code, is interesting this way to explain how to “write programs that later will write another program”. “Programming in large is a collective activity, it involves people, libraries, and it’s important to be able to interact with what other people have do in other languages”, this idea is especially interesting, due to the fact that is true, nowadays there are no just one programming language, ...
Leer más