the old adage 'standing on the shoulders of giants'
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
Have fun building something great!
-mike
"Spike" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
07/26/2004 02:36 PM
Please respond to cf-talk
To: CF-Talk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc:
Subject: RE: Hackers and Painters - Applied to Cold Fusion
One thing to realize about Lisp is that one of it's main design goals was
to
be an elegant mathematical solution to a number of computational problems.
The origins of it's design came first from a desire to work with
artificial
intellingence, and as a result to create a language to allow the
processing
of imperative and declarative sentences so that the computer could deduce
what the programmer wanted it to do.
While John McCarthy was designing the language, he used mathematical
notation to describe what it should do and how it should work. Steve
Russell
happened to notice that the eval function could act as an interpereter for
the language itself, wrote the code for it, and the language ended up with
it's odd parentheses loaded syntax.
It is completely different to any other language I have worked with and
I'm
sure I don't understand even a tiny fraction of the implications of the
way
it works, but I find that using it from time to time gives me a much
better
perspective from which to approach difficult problems in other languages.
It is generally regarded as the first language to support if/else
constructs
and several other ideas (http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html). It is also
approaching it's 50th birthday and is still widely regarded as one of the
most if not the most powerful programming languages around.
Definitely worth having in your programming toolbox if for nothing other
than to give you an alternative way to look at problems.
My 2 cents
Spike
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