I've been writing software for several years, mostly in C and C++,
with a bit of Eiffel, Miranda, Pascal, and a few scripting languages
acquired along the way. I'd been intending to learn Lisp for a while,
but hadn't made the time to get started.
Last night I spent some time reading the 3rd edition of Winston &
Horn's book "Lisp", and I tried out a few examples using clisp.
How does it strike me? It makes me feel like an archaeologist finding
the remains of a highly advanced civilisation in my bland suburban
back yard. The analogy may sound silly, but it isn't entirely
inappropriate. Often in the ancient world we find art, craft and
architecture that far surpasses anything being done today, but when we
find a new example it is always surprising. And that's the feeling I
get from Lisp. It is amazing.
I had very little understanding of how much "modern" languages owe to
Lisp, but even more surprising (to me) is how paltry the later
languages are by comparison. Maybe when I try to use Lisp for "real
world" projects I'll understand why it isn't so widely used. But right
now it seems to me that Lisp has everything a modern language needs,
and much more than most other languages provide.
The thing that impresses me most is how the elegance and (dare I say)
simplicity of the language extends all the way up and all the way
down. It seems possible to do so much with so little. By contrast with
C++ and other languages that have had pieces tacked onto them over the
years, the whole thing seems so uniformly elegant and intelligent.
I don't particularly care whether Lisp is (or becomes, or ceases to
be) widely used for commercial projects. However, I would like to make
some kind of contribution to keeping this a living tongue for new
generations of people like me to discover and use for their own
pleasure if nothing else. To this end, I'm wondering whether anybody
knows of any projects in progress to develop a free (beer and speech)
GUI library - preferably cross platform, but at minimum built to run
on free Unixen?
Thanks in advance for any tips.