LISP Class
Update: Please bring a laptop for class use if you have one.
Want to get into programming but it seems to complicated?
Does your current code seem more complex than it has too be?
Than attend the intro to Lisp programming talk on 5-7 and discover the power of the ultra simple yet consistent and expressive syntax of Lisp. Given by Joe O'Donnell: instantcallout.com
Lisp is a powerful programming language that a study found to be significantly faster to develop with than Java or c++ and comparable to c++ in execution speed:
http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf
Lisp was used to build the world's most powerful editor, Emacs, which secretaries learned how to program with on their own unprompted:
The language that you build your extensions on shouldn't be thought of as a programming language in afterthought; it should be designed as a programming language. In fact, we discovered that the best programming language for that purpose was Lisp.
It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (5). He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
"the greatest single programming language ever designed"
- Alan Kay, on Lisp
"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented."
- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
- Philip Greenspun
"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author
"Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages."
- Eric Raymond, in Open Sources on MIT's first OS, ITS
