Language extensibility (was: Why is tcl broken?)

[Michael Vanier]

thornley at visi.com (David Thornley) writes:
> In article <m3btdvhrlt.fsf at localhost.localdomain>,
> Lieven Marchand  <mal at bewoner.dma.be> wrote:
> >cbbrowne at news.brownes.org (Christopher B. Browne) writes:
> >
> >The difference between Moore and "just another of the opinionated
> >fools" is indeed that he gets results. I'm more into Common Lisp these
> >days but "Thinking Forth" is a book that has radically changed many of
> >my ideas about programming. 
> >
> I tend to learn new ways of thinking with new languages.  I came up with
> a really nice way of doing one particular thing in a C++ environment,
> and I'm positive it was inspired by "Lispy" thinking.  (Now if I can
> get my boss to buy in on it.....)
> 
> "Thinking Forth" is an excellent book to read.  So is Stroustrup's
> "Design and Evolution of C++".  I haven't seen a similar book about
> the Lisp way of thinking, not counting books specifically on learning
> Lisp and doing it well.  Then again, I find Common Lisp revolutionary
> enough sometimes.

IMHO the best book of this sort for Lisp is "On Lisp" by Paul Graham (and to a
lesser extent Graham's "ANSI Common Lisp").  After reading those books, you'll
never want to live without (Lisp) macros again ;-)  SICP is a *great* book,
but it's more about the Big Ideas In Computing than about Lisp/Scheme per se.
Graham's books describe how Lisp features (especially macros) allow you to
work at a higher level of abstraction than is possible in other languages, and
may evoke a religious transformation in susceptible readers ;-)

But-are-prefix-syntaxes-*really*-superior-to-infix-ones?-
You-be-the-judge-ly y'rs, Mike



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Mike Vanier	mvanier at bbb.caltech.edu
Department of Computation and Neural Systems, Caltech 216-76
Will optimize nonlinear functions with complex parameter spaces for food.