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submitted 10 months ago by cadar@lemmy.ml to c/lisp@lemmy.ml

This is another Friday social topic. You are aimlessly wandering around a beautiful hilltop by a sea when an angel approaches you from the opposite direction. She is no ordinary angel. She is a Lisp angel! She will grant one Lisp wish to you. Before she can fulfill your wish, she needs this information from you:

  1. Your favorite Lisp dialect.
  2. Your favorite non-Lisp programming language.
  3. Your favorite standard library function/macro/feature from your favorite Lisp dialect that you want to see in your favorite non-Lisp programming language.

Once you tell these 3 things to the angel, she will magically add your chosen feature to your chosen non-Lisp programming language.

What are your answers going to be?

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[-] Ramin_HAL9001@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
  1. "favorite Lisp dialect": Scheme (Guile, Gambit, and MIT/GNU)
  2. "favorite non-Lisp programming language": Haskell
  3. "favorite standard library function/macro/feature": homoiconicity, i.e. both code syntax and data structures built from S-expression, which makes features like syntax-case feature possible, and the ability to implement declarative domain specific languages with Haskell-like type checking on large parts of your program at compile time. If every language would like this, my life would be soooo much easier and less stressful.

One thing I hate about other languages is complicated syntax that makes it difficult or impossible to do macro-programming. S-expressions are a minimalist syntax that allows lisp to be well-adapted to most any use case, and features like defmacro or syntax-case are very well designed mechanisms for doing exactly that. Other languages like Python and JavaScript have macro-programming implementations but they are so hacky and not very well designed compared to most Lisps, which have the feature built right into the language.

this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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A community for the Lisp family of programming languages.

Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year.

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