Modern operating system and fancy programs are filled with scripting languages. MS DOS batch language, the various Unix shell languages, perl, tcl etc. are all very common. These are toy languages. They often have inconsistent and extremely annoying syntaxes, no scoping, and no macros. They were invented basically as macro languages for operating system shells, and as such make it fairly easy to concatenate together new shell commands (a task that is very tedious in assembly or C). However, their ambiguous and inconsistent syntaxes, their slow interpreted execution speeds, and the proliferation of too many alternatives has made them annoying to invest time in learning. Recently a new abomination has become quite popular, and its name is C++. This monstrosity of a language attempts to extend C in a direction it was never intended, by making structures able to contain functions. The problem is that the structure syntax is not very flexible, so the language is only customizable in this one direction. Hence one is forced to attempt to build all abstractions around the idea of the structure as class. This leads to odd classes which do not represent data structures, but instead represent abstract ways of doing. One of the nice things about C is that the difference between pointer and object is fairly clear, but in C++ this has become incomprehensibly vague, with all sorts of implicit ways to pass by reference. C++ programs also tend to be many times larger and slower than their C counterparts, compile much slower, and because C++ compilers are written in C, which can not handle flexible data structures well, the slightest change to the source code results in full compiles of the entire source tree. I am convinced that this last problem alone makes the language a severe productivity minus. But I forgot, since C++ must determine nearly everything at compile time you still have to write all the same code over and over again for each new data type.
The advent of the new class metaphor has brought to the fore C and C++’s weakness at memory management. Programmers are forced to create and destroy these new objects in a variety of bizarre fashions. The heap is managed by the wretched malloc model, which uses wasteful memory cookies, creates mysterious crashes on overwrites, and endless fragmentation.
None of these problems are present in Lisp, which is hands down the most flexible language in common use. Lisp is an old language (having its origins in the 50s) and has grown up over the last 30 years with the evolution of programming. Today’s modern Common Lisp is a far cry from the tiny mainframe list of 30 years ago. Aided by a consistent syntax which is trivial to parse, and the only full power macro system in a commonly used language, Lisp is extremely easy to update, customize, and expand, all without fighting the basic structures of the language. Over the years as lexical scoping, optimized compilation, and object oriented programming each came into vogue Lisp was able to gracefully adopt them without losing its unique character. In Lisp programs are built out of one of the language’s built in data structure, the list. The basic Lisp expression is the form. Which is either an atom (symbol or number) or a list of other forms. Surrounded by parentheses, a Lisp lists always has its function at the head, for example the C expression 2+2 is written as (+ 2 2). This may seem backwards at first, but with this simple rule much of the ambiguity of the syntax is removed from the language. Since computers have a very hard time with ambiguity, programs that write programs are much easier in Lisp.
>>14
honestly, anyone who would even consider doing that would just python instead. And it would be a nightmare anyways. It's hard enough to keep the parens in order as it is, without subtle rules related to indentation inserting more parens into the mess.