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Lisp Questions

Name: Anonymous 2011-11-18 19:59

So I have some questions about lisp. I've been learning programming but I hear some conflicting information so I need some things cleared up.

First of all, I keep hearing that the ability to wrote code others can read is huge, but since lisp is incredibly hard to read, wouldn't that make lisp programmers inherently bad programmers?

Also, can someone post some non-trivial lisp code? Every time I see someone post lisp code it's always something very short and trivial. Is it possible to write anything real with lisp?

Name: Anonymous 2011-11-19 22:50

First of all, I keep hearing that the ability to wrote code others can read is huge, but since lisp is incredibly hard to read, wouldn't that make lisp programmers inherently bad programmers?
Lisp isn't hard to read. Lisp is only subjectively hard to read to someone who hasn't been exposed to it for enough time (a week should be more than enough time, given that you're actually spending it learning the language and using a decent environment/implementation while doing so). Once you know Lisp, it's easy enough to read. It's actually easier to read than other pieces of code written in more verbose languages: consider a language (C-like or even more verbose) where your algorithm takes some 10k LOC, now consider a Lisp version which takes 1-2k LOC. The Lisp version will take less time to read, but if you're not familiar, reading might take more time, mostly because more semantically relevant content is contained in the same amount of space (in a way, you can think the same of natural language and math - they can sometimes represent an idea with less space than a formalized representation would, the only difference being that Lisp is already a formalized representation).
Also, can someone post some non-trivial lisp code? Every time I see someone post lisp code it's always something very short and trivial. Is it possible to write anything real with lisp?
Sure, I write it all the time, but I'm not going to post code from my own projects as that could identify me and this is a pseudonymous messageboard. I would suggest you go to cliki or http://common-lisp.net/projects.shtml or some other site hosting Lisp code and just read, there is a lot of non-trivial code. If you want to see something more specific, you'll need to tell us what kind of code you'd like to see.

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