Comment by cageface

14 days ago

I think it's quite telling that almost all of the innovations in lisp (garbage collection, first class functions, repl etc) have been absorbed into more popular languages except for s-expression syntax, which remains a small niche despite many great implementations of s-expression based languages.

5 comments

cageface

skydhash 14 days ago

Because as soon as you adopt the s-expressions, what you got is no longer <language>, but lisp itself. Something like this:

  static char _getch() {
    char buf;

    if (read(0, &buf, 1)) return buf;

    return '\0';
  }

would become:

  (define _getchar ()
    (declare static)
    (return-type 'char)
    (let ((buf (char)))
      (if (read 0 (& buf) 1)
        buf
        "\0")))

kaba0 14 days ago
No. There is a good github gist rant I can’t find anymore, but if we call every AST in the form of s-expressions lisp, then is anything lisp? A programming language has to have an associated evaluation strategy, otherwise it’s just data. What you wrote only makes sense to execute as C code, which sure you can write a compiler for in your given lisp as well (so can you write a C compiler taking C AST in any other language, so it’s not special at all).
- hayley-patton 14 days ago
  
  This one? https://gist.github.com/no-defun-allowed/4f0a06e17b3ce74c6ae...
  It also responds to a few parents up "almost all of the innovations in lisp [...] have been absorbed into more popular languages" - pervasive interactivity hasn't even been taken up by some "Lisps", let alone has it been absorbed outside Lisp.
  
  1 reply →
cageface 14 days ago

Right. From which we can infer people like many things about lisp except for the syntax.