On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 01:32:07PM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] spake thusly: > Andy and others (especially Paul Graham) have convinced > me to learn LISP because it sounds so cool. I just spent $54 on > Graham's ANSI Common LISP book and intend to dive in. (I got > Norvig's book too.)
I have been pondering this very issue myself. I am looking at LISP but more seriously considering Scheme. It's sort of like the perl vs python thing. LISP seems rather baroque... And it was Paul Graham's writings that have moved me to look into it. He is a recent new hero of mine. That reminds me: I have his excellent book "Hackers and Painters" which I have already read and greatly enjoyed. I is available for loan if anyone wants it. I intend to donate it to the KPLUG library. Does anyone really check books out of the kplug library? This book is the sort of thing I wish I could run off a bunch of copies of and give them away to friends. Having just one copy of it is so inefficient, buying many is expensive, and a lot of people won't read it unless it is dead tree. > Paul Graham's papers provide the best example I've found for actually > doing something useful with LISP....rapid development of > a web server component. Besides that I'm starving for justification > of where LISP is actually used for real benefits. Any ideas???? > > Besides stretching my brain, I'd like to think LISP knowledge > actually is useful. I know..wishful thinking. I think the idea of functional programming is very interesting and I am puzzled as to why it has not grown in popularity. More compact code meaning less to verify/debug, no side-effects, inherent modularity, etc. are all very good things that we are encouraged to do in imperative languages but often do not because it is so easy to exercise those bad habits. The only reason I can think of for the lack of popularity is that LISP got a reputation for being slow back when cpu time was expensive and C and other imperative languages took over all of the mindshare. I love the idea of functional programming as being described as what you want done not how you want it done. In learning about cfengine I see that cfengine employs similar ideas in that you describe the idea system state rather than how to get there. -- Tracy Reed http://ultraviolet.org This message is cryptographically signed for your protection. Info: http://copilotconsulting.com/sig
pgpk7hZlQFRbT.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
