Self-Wright
Calculating, Scheming, and Paul Graham
I came across [this paper] recently, and it challenged some of the thoughts/assumptions that had been building in my mind for a while (it discusses Scheme vs Miranda, but you can imagine Lisp vs Haskell instead).
It also mirrors a short email exchange I had with someone who I expected to be a Scheme/Lisp “champion”, but who gently led me down from my gas balloon of hype.
Yes, S-expressions are…
I came across [this paper] recently, and it challenged some of the thoughts/assumptions that had been building in my mind for a while (it discusses Scheme vs Miranda, but you can imagine Lisp vs Haskell instead).
It also mirrors a short email exchange I had with someone who I expected to be a Scheme/Lisp “champion”, but who gently led me down from my gas balloon of hype.
Yes, S-expressions are great, and one can fall in love with them, and the notion of “building material” for a language to build an application or solve a problem, but there’s no point being dogmatic about them.
Also, another tangential perspective: people consider Paul Graham a big advocate of Lisp, but in my opinion there is no one who has harmed the cause of Common Lisp more than Paul Graham.
Instead of praising the language that allowed him to build his own “killer app”, or teaching the specific details of his implementation, or his own work with the language, what did he proceed to do instead? Ask everyone to wait for his “perfect language” (i.e. stop using Common Lisp!!), and write inflated, abstract articles attracting only language lawyers and the my-language-is-longer-than-yours crowd. Sheesh.
If you want to learn Common Lisp, read The Land of Lisp or PAIP or PCL instead, or browse the sources of Hunchentoot or gendl (or some of the other well-used open-source libraries out there).
What is interesting about this is that we can write procedures which construct other procedures. This is not to be confused with the ability to construct S-expression representations of procedures; that ability is shared by all of the interpreters we have examined.
The ability to construct procedures was not available in the dynamically scoped interpreter. In solving the violation of referential transparency we seem to have stumbled across a source of additional abstractive power.
Abacus Noir 