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by tnovelli 6141 days ago
He rambles a lot, but he's right about the need for a new Lisp, and refers to the ILC'05 presentations by Dussud, Baker, and McCarthy on "Re-inventing Lisp". Those are some pretty radical proposals. (Summaries: http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/06/ilc-2005-wednesday-r...).

I think the trouble with Lisp (and Scheme) is that there's so much cruft and inconsistency beneath the veneer of simplicity (see http://tnovelli.blogspot.com/2009/08/lisp-crisis.html). Lisp is a great language to study; I just wish it was more practical and popular. It sucks having to choose between awkward (Lisp) and inflexible (everything else). :-(
1 comments
KirinDave 6141 days ago
Your resources are pretty old, the "crisis" of car/cadr is just not there with modern, updated lisp implementations like PLT Scheme.

PLT Scheme is competitive in every way with Python and Ruby, I don't know why people keep ignoring it.

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tnovelli 6141 days ago
Umm... what's this scheme_make_pair(car,cdr) function in plt/src/mzscheme/src/list.c? That's a wart (the crisis is in my mind :-)

It doesn't have to be that way: Clojure has abstract sequence types, with cons/car/cdr wrappers in case you want them.

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KirinDave 6140 days ago
I fail to see how having a linked list datatype is a crisis. Use vectors if you don't like them. You can write a very large amount of complex, fully-functional scheme code without ever typing in any expression matching "c[ad]+r". PLT Scheme also comes with a host of sequence-agnostic (or sequence aware for performance) comprehensions:

Please refer to: http://doc.plt-scheme.org/guide/for.html

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