On Tuesday, 25 December 2012 at 20:29:54 UTC, so wrote:
I am reading the book "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp", and i have to say it was somewhat a shocking experience. The fact that in a popular book about the highest level language which includes chapters for writing interpreters, compilers, yet i haven't met a c/c++ book including such things, it is said these languages are one of the low level languages. I know it is much easier to write those for lisp than C, yet try to understand my point.
SICP also leads the student from the very basics all the way to the writing of a Scheme interpreter and a compiler in Scheme. That would probably not be possible in a reasonable number of pages for a language with a more complex syntax. Anyway, that doesn't mean that it's not possible, it's just take a whole lot more effort to do the same in C++ or in D.
As for being a better programmer after having used some advanced concepts, I don't know. I think every feature of a language must be used where appropriate. I've seen some Python code using heavily map/filter/etc that was simply unreadable to me. In some places, I find it easier to understand for loops, while in other cases, using functional style programming conveys the intent better. But maybe that's just me.
