Bill Clementson posted some observations on how much you can do with a little bit of lisp code. I think the point isn't so much that Lisp is the greatest language ever invented, insofar as a very expressive language lets you do a helluva lot without a lot of effort.
Just like Perl. ;-)
LISPy docs
jhorwitz on 2004-01-29T18:36:56
I worked as an intern at Interleaf (now BroadVision) many moons ago -- documents in their document management system (coded in LISP) were actually stored as LISP. In addition to making things like auto-updating TOC's and indexes really simple, you could write code that could manipulate any part of any document including generating dynamic or conditional content from within the document itself. Kind of what Word macros *want* to be. Today, things like TT2 and Mason let us take this kind of technology for granted, but back in the day it was a real killer "app" in the document management industry.
LISP leads to Python
dws on 2004-01-29T22:11:01
Some number of ex-Lisp people I know have adapted to Python. Peter Norvig, a long time Lisp hacker,
provides an interesting comparison, including a nifty timing chart comparing various languages.
Re:LISP leads to Python
I'd prefer to use a compiled ML (such as ocaml), which
combines the density of functional programming with the
error-checking and performance of static typing.
AutoLISP
runrig on 2004-01-30T02:55:30
I used to work with
AutoCAD which included a subset of LISP called
AutoLISP. There are some large (often vertical-market-type) third party AutoLISP apps out there, as well as the multitude of quick-n-dirty utilities.
