On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Brendon Schumacker <[email protected]>wrote:
> > One worry I have with LISP is that it isn't being kept up with and so > there might not be as many interesting things you can do with it these > days. Can you create a windowed desktop app (or any GUI) with LISP? > Can I connect to a network with it? What are some ways that LISP is > still being used today? > > Check out Clojure - http://clojure.org/ - a new Lisp dialect that runs in the Java virtual machine. Although a relatively new project, it has already attracted a substantial and active developer community. It was started in part to address perceived shortcomings and fossilization in the Common Lisp project. Main interesting features: - Standard Lisp stuff you'd expect from any Lisp like macros, SLIME, REPL - JVM platform means you get transparent access to all of the huge number of standardized Java libraries that exist already (including robust and mature GUI toolkits like Swing and SWT), and your code runs unmodified on any operating system with a JVM - All data is immutable by default, meaning in many cases you can parallelize code over multiple cores with little to no modification (e.g. just change "map" to "pmap" to get a parallel list comprehension. That's it.) - But you can still use mutable data if you really want to, and it gives you a powerful software transactional memory system to do so in a safe and well defined way. - Pervasive lazy sequences - monads, SQL interface, robust error handling, other cool stuff in http://richhickey.github.com/clojure-contrib/api-index.html - Multimethod dispatch based polymorphism (in addition to the Java class system) "Differences with other Lisps" at http://clojure.org/lisps has some more details. Cheers, Paul
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