I've seen so much about how lisp is the language to use for pretty much everything, that it's so much faster to write good, clean, extensible Lisp code than in any other language. It should be very practical indeed! I've found many sources claiming that, but their reasons essentially boil down to "it just is" which lead me to believe that they don't actually know either.lis0r wrote:Lisp throws away all the practicality, most links with the real world, and concentrates on the theoretical basis of computation.
There have been several obstacles in the way of me properly learning Lisp. The biggest overarching complaint that I have is that computer science scholars are exceptionally bad at describing things, and especially those dealing with Lisp. Lisp isn't a mainstream language, so the few people who can actually write coherent, useful teaching guides haven't. Picking up the language is easy enough because it's so simple at heart, working out why you'd ever want to use it is turning out to be really hard work.
For example, a perfect introductory guide would start with the second frame of that cartoon with the caption "This Is Lisp" - for me that epiphany happened only after many months, and it's something you really need to understand before you can actually do anything.
The other big problem that I have is that I'm working at learning Lisp backwards. That is, I'm already familiar with Lua, Javascript and Python, which are all derived from Lisp in some respect or other. I'm used to the Lisp-like features, so I think I'm dulled by them. Functions as values, closures and so on. Lua in particular seems to do quite a lot of things better than Lisp from a practical point of view. But I'm probably missing something.
Anyway, I'm about a fifth of the way through On Lisp, thanks to the link up there, so we'll see how it goes.
