Emacs website, Lisp, and other

[Christopher Dimech]

Alan, we both opened a discussion on tangents.



> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2024 at 8:03 AM
> From: "Alan Mackenzie" <acm@muc.de>
> To: emacs-tangents@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Emacs website, Lisp, and other
>
> Hello, Emanuel.
>
> On Mon, Aug 05, 2024 at 00:55:48 +0200, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> > Jeremy Bryant wrote:
>
> > > Lisp is the most powerful and elegant of programming
> > > languages. If you want to see how powerful and elegant
> > > a programming language can be, you need to learn Lisp.
> > > It will give you standard for measuring other languages.
>
> > Ah, I don't know, that kind of boasting. Powerful and elegant
> > are both immeasurable things, well, maybe in electrical
> > engineering one can measure it.
>
> > > Calling Emacs Lisp "python-like" is derogatory to Emacs
> > > Lisp. Python has some of the characteristics that make Lisp
> > > superior, but not all of them.
>
> > Okay, then everyone should know this is a controversial thing
> > to say. No one, or very few, would recommend Emacs Lisp as an
> > alternative to Python 2024.
>
> > It will sounds like we are a bunch of fanatics boasting from
> > our own echo chamber were, inside it, we all are fantastic and
> > high on Lisp.
>
> > Lisp's superiority is a myth.
>
> > To me it is more like a drug :)
>
> To understand the opposite point of view, read one of Paul Graham's
> essays at https://paulgraham.com/icad.html, where he describes 9
> novelties introduced by Lisp into programming in 1958, and how most, but
> not all, of these have since been adopted by lesser languages.
>
> My own view is that Lisp indeed is one of the top languages, but that
> Common Lisp is too big, and thus too difficult, to learn for most
> programmers.  For those who succeed in learning it, their productivity
> will be enormous whilst using it.  Maybe this productivity could be
> matched by other "strange" languages (Haskell, perhaps?), but not by
> "normal" languages such as C, C++, Java, Python or perl.  I think it a
> pity that a moderate sized Lisp, something around the size of Emacs Lisp
> without the cl-* extensions, never made it as a general purpose language
> alongside the above.
>
> > --
> > underground experts united
> > https://dataswamp.org/~incal
>
> --
> Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
>
> ---
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>