From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@9fans.net
Date: Mon,  7 Sep 2009 08:54:32 +0000
From: Paul Donnelly <paul-donnelly@sbcglobal.net>
Message-ID: <87ws4ejrpr.fsf@plap.localdomain>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
References: <542783.92348.qm@web83904.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] nice quote
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 67ba186a-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

eris.discordia@gmail.com (Eris Discordia) writes:

> I whined about LISP on yet another thread. Above says precisely why I
> did. LISP is twofold hurtful for me as a naive, below average
> hobbyist. For one thing the language constructs do not reflect the
> small computer primitives I was taught somewhere around the beginning
> of my education. For another, most (simple) problems I have had to
> deal with are far better expressible in terms of those very
> primitives. In other words, for a person of my (low) caliber, LISP is
> neither suited to the family of problems I encounter nor suited to the
> machines I solve them on. Its claim to fame as the language for
> "wizards" remains. Although, mind you, the AI paradigm LISP used to
> represent is long deprecated (Rodney Brooks gives a good overview of
> this deprecation, although not specifically targeting LISP, in
> "Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI").

Consider that your introduction to Lisp may have been very poor. You're
right that the mapping from Lisp primitives to machine primitives isn't
as direct as that in, but Lisp doesn't represent any AI paradigm at all,
nor a particular programming paradigm, and its name hasn't been written
in caps for perhaps 30 years. I'm not trying to nitpick; I'm only saying
that there are a lot of weird ideas about Lisp floating around which a
person can hardly be blamed for picking up on, and these are the reasons
it sounds to me like you have.

> One serious question today would be: what's LISP _really_ good for?
> That it represents a specific programming paradigm is not enough
> justification.

I think most Lispers would say it's _really_ good for anything but the
most demanding number crunching, or perhaps A-list games
programming. Probably you'd run into trouble in some parallel
programming situations, for reasons more related to implementation
support and libraries than reasons intrinsic to the language. And the
justification would be that Lisp is an embarrassingly multiparadigm
language, as general-purpose as they come.