|
Arto Bendiken has posted a wonderful Q&A on how he got started with Lisp, with the same title as this post.
His path is not dissimilar to mine except that I had the good fortune to get hooked on dynamic languages early on, which is possibly why I have been slower to get from B to C with Lisp (less need when you can implement many list based and functional idioms in Perl).
I almost want to like Smalltalk more than Lisp, but I suspect that is because of the OO ingrained in me and also my worship of Xerox Parc, Douglas Engelbart, etc. My gut instinct, however, tells me that Lisp is just that one level higher.
I'm very interested in any languages/dialects that implement the power of Lisp with less noise. I'm sure it's possible, but it just hasn't been "discovered" yet. On the other hand, perhaps it's not. Perhaps the endless, nested, streams of braces and symbols are the purest representation of code. Like logic DNA.
Update: In Arto's post he mentions the Lisp machines. I would suggest that in a not dissimilar way that Squeak is a software embodiment of the Alto Smalltalk Machine, Emacs is a rough embodiment of a Lisp machine. Some people even use Emacs as their entire windowing system.
|
Print page format
