Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Mikeb85 4577 days ago
Strange. I never learned it in college, just on my own for fun, but I've found it to be quite elegant (if impractical compared to better modern languages). The fact that everything is an expression and you can use any expression anywhere makes it very easy to learn, and powerful.

I personally find it more enjoyable to use than things like C. Then again, for one historical reason or another, C-type languages won, and nowadays are the easiest path to making software, since you'll inevitably have to interact with an OS, window toolkit, libraries, etc..., that all have a C/C++ interface...

1 comments

>> impractical compared to better modern languages

How much did 'they' pay you to say that? :D

But seriously Lisps are by far the most advanced programming languages. They just take a huge amount of effort to learn.

> How much did 'they' pay you to say that? :D

I wish.

Seriously though, most modern languages have Lisp features. Even Java 8 will get Lambdas. Quite a few languages have macros. Many languages have eval and REPLs.

Right now I'm playing around quite a bit with Haxe. Cool language, static typing (w/ type inference), pattern matching, closures, macros, and compiles to half a dozen languages and nearly every platform known to mankind...