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by cormullion 5688 days ago
newLISP is a scripting language with a Lisp-like syntax. It's designed to be a Lisp-flavoured alternative to Perl or PHP or AppleScript. The emphasis is on staying small (250Kb) and easy to install, learn, and use. As a non-programmer I'm not clever enough to learn CL or Clojure, but I found newLISP pretty easy to learn and use for day-to-day scripting tasks and CGI work.

It's based on the ideas of Lisp, rather than on anything more concrete. I've been able to glimpse some of the elegance that Lisp users are familiar with. It shares some Lisp DNA (hence the name), but the author's focus on code size and ease of use has moved it away from mainstream Lisp developments. It won't (and doesn't) appeal to everyone, and wouldn't be suitable for all projects, but I've found it a useful tool to have in my toolbox. At least, it helps me get my work done and I've had some fun with it too, which can't be a bad thing, can it?
1 comments
prodigal_erik 5688 days ago
If anyone's considering picking up newLISP, be advised they made some widely criticized design decisions (such as omitting lexical scope, closures, pass by reference, and GC) intended to speed up the interpreter. Last I heard, they don't plan on having a compiler.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2911

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mahmud 5688 days ago
omitting lexical scope, closures, pass by reference, and GC

None of those decisions were made for performance reasons, but because the creator of newLisp had no idea how to do them (lexical scope and call by reference were initially performance hacks, and actually make programs faster and/or smaller.)

A better name for the language would have been newBASIC, but even Basic is garbage collected. People who intend to use newLisp really need not suffer the parentheses. The language exists in familiar form as QBasic.

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prodigal_erik 5688 days ago
According to http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html, at the time implementing lexical scope was a leap of faith. It was broadly assumed to be less efficient.
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zem 5688 days ago
yeah, lush (http://lush.sourceforge.net/) is a lot more interesting in the alternative-lisp space, but they too omit lexical scoping :(
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