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by lispm
746 days ago
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I usually don't want to call people "idiots", but I would want to prevent confusion. Even though English is a Germanic language, it's not German. It's a matter of expectation. If a book title says "Lerne Deutsch" it's not meant to mean "Learn English". Same for "Learn Lisp" and "Learn Clojure". Both books usually will be about different languages. For example there was a book "The Little Lisper", for Scheme it was renamed the "The Little Schemer". People then knew that the book is using the Scheme dialect of Lisp and not Lisp itself. Btw., even though "lernen" and "learn" are coming from a common language background (Proto German, also called Common Germanic, no joke -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language) and here mean the same. |
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There's no confusion. Anyone who wants to learn Lisp can start with Emacs Lisp, Racket, Guile, Janet, Fennel, Clojure, or Common Lisp, and soon they'd know how they differ. Telling people "Oh no, Clojure is not an actual Lisp" is disingenuous. Yes, there are certain differences, but the main ingredients are there - homoiconicity, macros, REPL-driven. Sure, in some contexts, clarification is required, and usually, it is present. I have never heard anyone say something like "I actually wanted to learn Lisp, but I ended up using Clojure and never found out what 'the real Lisp' is like." When people want to specifically talk about Common Lisp, they say that. Again, I have no idea what the fuzz is about, Clojure is a Lisp. Yes, it's not Common Lisp, it's not Emacs Lisp, we know that. Most people who know just a bit about Lisps, do know that. And yet we're arguing like someone accidentally may end up using wrong Lisp and kill thousands of polar bears or something.