Choosing a programming language as a competitive tool

[Max Haas]

am 5.5.2001 22:10 Uhr schrieb Douglas Alan unter nessus at mit.edu:

> "Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> writes:
> 
>> I tried learning Lisp from an essay in Douglas Hofstadter's
>> "Metamagical Themas."  I learned to car, cdr and setq, and that was
>> about it.  I couldn't see how to apply that to problems I wanted to
>> solve (probably because the essays didn't talk about I/O) so I put
>> it aside for a while.
> 
> Sounds more like a criticism of Computer Science than of Lisp.
> Douglas Hofstadter's column was designed to teach you interesting
> concepts in Computer Science, rather than how to do anything
> practical.  If you'd read a good book on practical programming in Lisp
> (I don't know if there are any), then you'd probably feel differently.

You can find a book in the internet written by David Lamkins:

- Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp,

look at http://www.psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/contents.html

There in chapter 33 (http://www.psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/chapter33.html) you
find a commented bibliography. Lamkins highly recommends

Stephen Slade, Object-Oriented Common Lisp

BTW: The starting point of this thread was a hint of J. Schmitt (hope I
remember correctly!) to an article of Paul Graham. Most of Graham's
arguments are based on his experience with Common Lisp in view of the
sentence "Lisp is a programmable programming language" (as John Foderaro has
put it once upon a time). Graham wrote a book about these possibilities of
Lisp: On Lisp. Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp 9mostly dealing with
macros).

I'm not a professional programmer as many of you are. But a question comes
to my mind: is it useful to compare languages? If the concept of a
programmable programming language holds true then the question could be how
you build with your extended Lisp just the solution for your problem. May be
this is an oldy. I remember a sentence of Don Knuth (who built TeX). He once
said that he would not build something as LaTeX but would write for every
book the macros needed for the current book. I like the idea of many TeX's
(or many Lisp's).

Regards

Max