Re:The Failure of Lisp? A Reply To Brandon Werner
by dlweinreb on Saturday September 20, 2008 @07:57PM
(#310138)
I'd like to understand what you mean. Is there a way you could provide an illustrative example?
Re:The Failure of Lisp? A Reply To Brandon Werner
by ced on Saturday September 20, 2008 @01:13PM
(#309961)
>I don't buy that concision is power. This borders on a tautology, but expressiveness is power. Concision is part of that (a big part, even), but it's not everything.
Yeah, I completely agree. I was going to write about it, but then figured it wasn't relevant to the question.
I'd love to discuss these old PG essays one day.
My only problem with Lisp is that it's exactly the sum of its parts - no more, no less. Everything decomposes into self-similar pieces, which decompose into other pieces, and on and on, turtles almost all the way down. This is wonderfully elegant, but also feels like it precludes creating something which is more than the sum of its parts. This may not seem like a problem to a lot of people, or just sound like self-important nonsense, but the thing I enjoy most about programming is the tangible sense of gestalt you get when you've been working on a codebase for long enough. For me, Lisp doesn't provide that.