From: Jeff Dalton
Subject: Re: Book review: "Lisp Style and Design"
Date:
Message-ID: <6797@skye.ed.ac.uk>
In article <·····················@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> ······@eris.enet.dec.com (Jon Callas) writes:
When I talk to people about how great it is to work on a modern
computer with a real modern language -- (no dangling pointers! --
real interactive development -- we all know the rest) -- the usual
response I get is, "Enh. I used Lisp in college once. I *hate* CAR
and CDR." Then I tell them that they don't have use CAR and CDR.
Those were old, yucky Lisp. In new modern Lisp, there's CAR and CDR
for the old people, but for the rest of us, there's FIRST and REST.
They get enthused, and once they're sucked in I break the news about
MAPCAR to them.
I meant my snide remark. Using FIRST and REST is entering into the
'80s. If you want to enter into the '90s, you use CLOS classes and
DEFSTRUCT, and trust your friendly compiler writers.
This isn't really true. That is, there wasn't a change in style in
the 80's from CAR and CDR to FIRST and REST or even a consensus that
FIRST and REST are always better. Just look at Scheme, for instance,
which has CAR and CDR but not FIRST and REST.
However, some people (eg Winston and Horn in their textbook) have
tried to encourage such a change by writing as if it had already
happened.
Many people who tried Lisp in the past and didn't like it focus
on CAR and CDR as part of what they don't like. But these are
such superficial aspects of the language that there's almost
always more to it. Many people who "used Lisp in college once"
were given something closer to a 50s presentation of Lisp than
a 70s or 80s, and there are certainly a number of things that
did change by or during the 80s that would make Lisp much more
attractive.
-- jd
From: Joseph Lavinus
Subject: Re: Book review: "Lisp Style and Design"
Date:
Message-ID: <2833@creatures.cs.vt.edu>
In article <····@skye.ed.ac.uk> ····@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>[a lot of stuff about people who don't like Lisp deleted]
>Many people who "used Lisp in college once"
>were given something closer to a 50s presentation of Lisp than
>a 70s or 80s, and there are certainly a number of things that
>did change by or during the 80s that would make Lisp much more
>attractive.
Actually, I think many people's resistance to Lisp (or any programming
paradigm that is significantly different from the FORTRAN/Algol lineage)
is caused purely by inertia - much the way people of the mid-20th century
resisted the coming of the automatic transmission.
In addition, most of the people you describe never crested the learning
curve, and no-one likes to make the switch to something new (for instance,
I'm still struggling to break away from vi).
Just my 2 cents' worth...
Joe
--
___________________________________ /o)\ _____________________________________
Joseph W. Lavinus, Virginia Tech \(o/ email: ·······@cstheory.cs.vt.edu
"How can I do this? I don't know; and because I do not know,
I shall make the attempt." --- e e cummings