eris.discor...@gmail.com (Eris Discordia) writes: >> Let me be a little pedantic. > > The 9fans know given the haphazard nature of a hobbyist's knowledge I > am extremely bad at this, but then let me give it a try. > >> FYI, it's been Lisp for a while. > > As long as Britannica and Merriam-Webster call it LISP I don't think > calling it LISP would be strictly wrong. Has LISt Processing become > stigmatic in Lisp/LISP community?
Just the orthography. > Indeed, my only encounter with LISP has been Scheme and through a > failed attempt to read SICP. Next time you get a hankering to see what all the fuss is about, you could try a book like Practical Common Lisp (which can be read online at http://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ). SICP is a good book, but it's geared toward introducing fundamental programming concepts like abstraction with a minimum of language features, which is necessarily at odds with getting stuff done in a straightforward way. > If you have a scrawny x86 on your desktop and are trying to implement, > say, a bubble sort--yes, the notorious bubble sort, it's still the > first thing that comes to a learner's mind--it seems C is quite apt > for expressing your (embarrassing) solution in terms of what is > available on your platform. Loops, arrays, swapping, with _minimal_ > syntactic distraction. Simple, naive algorithms should end up in > simple, immediately readable (and refutable) code. Compare two > implementations and decide for yourself: > > <http://en.literateprograms.org/Bubble_sort_(Lisp)> > <http://en.literateprograms.org/Bubble_sort_(C)> I must say that the Lisp version is much simpler and clearer to me, while the C version is mildly baffling. Does that make me a wizard who can hardly read simple C code, or is it just a matter of what you and I are respectively more comfortable with? >> The main benefits it had in AI were features that came from garbage >> collection and interactive development. > > More importantly, LISt Processing which used to be an element of the > expert systems approach to AI and which is now defunct (as a way of > making machines intelligent, whatever that means). While "expert > systems" continue to exist the word causes enough reverb of failure to > be replaced by other buzzwords: knowledge-based systems, automated > knowledge bases, and whatnot. Don't assume that just because Lisp is useful for list processing that it's not useful for a wide variety of problem-solving approaches. I've seen many people get hung up on lists (and recursion), thinking that they are somehow the essence of Lisp programming.
