Re:I Still ‘Lisp’ (and You Should Too)
by gaze on Sunday February 19, 2023 @06:45PM
(#34863112)
Every lisp variant is a bit different. Racket, Clojure, and Common Lisp are all excellent. Read a bit about the compromises and dip your toes in one and see if it sticks.
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Racket has more didactic origins but I’m given to understand its a good albeit slow general purpose Lisp. Common Lisp is basically the kitchen sink programming language and with a good compiling implementation like SBCL it’s possible to write high performance code. Clojure is the Lisp that you’re most likely to get paid to write. It’s as performant as any JVM hosted language.
I like Racket, but it is also a kitchen sink Scheme. It has a ton of features: GUI framework, drawing (although it's slow), event spaces, places, futures, OOP, mixins, traits, macros, #langs, etc. It can get quite complex very quickly. I have mainly used it as a Scheme.
Re:I Still ‘Lisp’ (and You Should Too)
by umanwizard on Monday February 20, 2023 @07:45AM
(#34867568)
> It’s as performant as any JVM hosted language.
Surely not true if you write it idiomatically using the standard “purely functional” collections.
No, but it offers a lot of escape hatches to get closer to Java-level performance: transients, mutable fields with deftype, atoms, transducers to minimize intermediate sequences, type-hinting, Java interop, etc.
I've seen Clojure sped up to within 20% of Java's speed, at the cost of very un-Clojure-y code.