Hi Anik Welcome to the picolisp mailing list. First, LISP itself is a "normal" language in the sense that everything you can do in other languages, you can also do in LISP. Technically, some stuff is easier expressed with a LISP language than a C-like language, while C-like languages usually give more ways to restrict the usage of your code for other programmers (which might be useful for BigCorp with many devs).
There are many different flavours of LISP, which have some things in common (making them all LISPS, e.g. the S-expression syntax), but they can be radically different. Picolisp is a rather special lisp, because it is interpreter-only (no compiler), makes use of F-expressions (functions with unevaluated arguments) which came out of fashion for most lisp languages long ago, and above all picolisp is radically simple and succinct. Additionally picolisp is quite small for an interpreter and performance can be better than compiled binaries of other languages (e.g. see http://kazimirmajorinc.com/Documents/The-speed-of-eval-in-some-Lisp-implementations/index.html ). Check out this interactive explanation of picolisp philosophy: http://picolisp.com/tractatus Currently, picolisp is probably mainly used for web applications and scripting (e.g. instead of bash). Some people use it for embedded programming or for teaching programming. You can use it for everything really, though interfacing with another application/system might need some extra work as there probably isn't a ready-made solution available for your specific use case. Lisp and even more picolisp gives you the power to develop problem-tailored solutions quickly and easily. I use picolisp mainly because of the quick development time, short code and the absolute awesome integrated database. Also, picolisp is very stable and tested tech, unlike e.g. node.js and co. Drop by in IRC on #picolisp on freenode.org if you like. ----- Original Message ----- From: Anik Biswas [mailto:biswasanikar...@gmail.com] To: picolisp@software-lab.de Sent: Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:54:32 +0600 Subject: Subscribe Hello, I'm Anik. I would like to know about LISP and I've a question i.e. Is LISP useful in today's world? How? Why should I use LISP?
