Hacker Monthly: November 2010 Special Debate Issue by Netizens Media

Author:Netizens Media
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Fifobooks.com
Published: 2012-01-07T06:23:18+00:00

Commentary

By Mahmud Mohamed

Did you really choose Lisp over alternatives?

Before learning CL I was a fairly decent, C, C++ and Perl programmer. Did assembly, Pascal, TCL and Awk. Up to that point, I always had to pause a for a minute when starting a new project/script, think about its scope, and choose a language based on the necessary performance, development speed, expressiveness, available libraries, etc. (and whether whoever was going to read the code afterward knew the language; C was often a natural choice for code shared with others on Unix, C++ for MFC/COM, Perl for sysadmin stuff, and TCL and Awk for my own tools.)

I learned Lisp in over a month, to spite someone (I dared a notorious troll I would write an AI bot of his choice if he stopped spamming us, youthful bravado for sure, and I lost the bet) While researching "AI" I came across Winston and Horn's "Common Lisp," then the hyperspec, then a few more books over the course of a month. I sat down with SICP and did the exercises on my break, while I was in school and waiting tables.

After I learned it however, specially with CLOS, there was no contest. Three months after buying Sonya Keene's CLOS book it was fair to say I forgot all other programming languages. There were no more "projects"; I no longer had to sketch out designs on paper or do "requirement analysis" (something I was told in school was necessary for all software.) For once, the great ideas in my head were a new emacs buffer away. I could write code faster than I would in Perl, Awk or TCL, it ran as fast as C++, and it was more expressive than the English in my head. I could type "commands" into a shell get a dialog embedded in my window, a few more commands and it would move to the upper right corner, I could change its name property and add text to it, then I could fold that dialog box into a menu-item named "Help" in the menu bar and call that dialog box "About." Amazing.

I went on hacking like this for about year when I realized I was doing the "wrong thing." You see, I had been using CMUCL with its built-in editor and writing GUI applications in Motif (it was 2001 and Motif wasn't open source yet, so I got the hang of Lesstif and learned its quirks.) Right around this time, Linux GUIs were maturing and people were being snobs about their Enlightenment themes and dissing each other over their choice of Window Manager. So I was peer-pressured into learning DHTML and Web Design. I read comp.lang.lisp and those too were snobbish condescending idiots who flamed everyone, especially competent programmers whose work I admired (including Scott McKay and Robert Fahlman (the very people who gave me my CMUCL.))

It was really hard to be a Lisper for a while, especially a young impressionable one who read cll uncritically; news of corporate giants coming with new tools and programming languages to enslave humanity were abound.

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