Today, Kevin D. Clark gleaned this insight:
>
> Derek Martin writes:
>
> > No but you have equally obscure and meaningless keywords like car, cdr,
> > and lambda etc.
>
> CAR and CDR refer to a register in the IBM 704.
>
> Lambda refers to the lambda calculus.
>
> Obscure? Maybe, although my (excellent) LISP teacher told me what CAR
> and CDR referred to on nearly the first day I was learning LISP.
> (he didn't get to "lambda" until quite a bit later...)
Yeah mine did too, but if you're learning it from a book (mine didn't
mention it at all) then it's still pretty bizarre. And besides which,
when was the last time you programmed an IBM 704? Obscure? DEFINITELY.
> I'm not sorry that my undergraduate career included quite a bit of
> LISP. I appreciate the perspective I've gained, and for certain
> problems I still gravitate towards LISP for solving them.
I'm not either... I'm merely pointing out that some of it's syntax is just
as esoteric as in other languages. I found it no simpler and no more
difficult to learn than others I've used.
Except maybe perl... I've looked at perl books and the stuff I've read is
just so inelegant that I really just have no desire to learn it. All the
power of it aside. It's like the bastard child of some bizzare lovefest
between Unix shell, C, sed, awk, and maybe a few other things. ICK!
In theory, it should be fairly easy for me to learn it, since I can at
least minimally program in all of those... but I find the concept of
mishmashing them all in one hodgepodge distasteful. So I balk.
--
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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