From: Robbie Carlton <robbie.carlton@...>
Date: 2005-09-19T22:58:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Language recommendations from ruby persons....

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I would wholeheartedly recomend lisp.
It's definitely alternative
It's more practical than you might have heard
It's not as difficult as you seem to think. Common lisp is big, and yes car=
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cdr and cons are funny names for functions, but after that the majority of=
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function names are self explanatory almost to the point of verbosity, and=
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I've never met a programmer yet who couldn't remember the name of three=20
functions.
But the most important point is that lisp is fun.
Really really really fun.
So fun that it was the deciding factor in me becoming a professional=20
programmer. If it wasn't for lisp I would be doing something completely=20
different for a living right now (maybe teaching English).
I took up Ruby because Lisp is not supported on many servers yet (waiting=
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for arc), and ruby is as close as it gets in terms of flexibilty,=20
expressiveness and power. But there are some things that you can only do in=
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lisp.

I'm paraphrasing/misquoting someone here (probably Paul Graham)

"Lisp turns the easy, boring and tedious task of solving your problem into=
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the difficult but interesting task of extending the language"

This is the heart of whats amazing about lisp: macros (which are not like=
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macros in C, so don't even think it.) let you extend and redifine the=20
language however you want.
And don't worry about the parens, they quickly sink below your conscoius=20
awareness.

check out www.paulgraham.com <http://www.paulgraham.com> for extremely=20
interesting lisp advocacy from a man who is a millionaire(or at least very=
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rich) off the back of lisp.

And I'm sorry to get so fanatical about another language in a ruby list. I=
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still love you ruby.

On 9/19/05, James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
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> On Sep 18, 2005, at 11:32 PM, Kev Jackson wrote:
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> > Lisp - got playing with this on a very boring business trip
> > (there's an online interpreter somewhere, google for Lisp
> > tutorial). Pros
> > - you can do pretty much anything with it (the tutorial leads
> > you through writing your own mini-language for an old school
> > adventure game, it was an eye-opener how easy it was).
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> I'm interested in this tutorial, if you wouldn't mind providing a
> link. I did some Googling, but couldn't seem to come up with it.
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> James Edward Gray II
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>=20
>

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