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Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)

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372 points Eric_WVGG | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.365s | source
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taeric ◴[16 Oct 24 15:38 UTC] No.41860340[source]▶
I do think LISP remains the major language that can encompass the strange loop idea he explored in his work. I know LISP is not the only homoiconic language, but it is the biggest that people know how to use where the "eval" function doesn't take in a string that has to be parsed.

I hate that people are convinced LISP == functional programming, writ large. Not that I dislike functional programming, but the symbolic nature of it is far more interesting to me. And it amuses me to no end that I can easily make a section of code that is driven by (go tag) sections, such that I can get GOTO programming in it very easily.

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1. kazinator ◴[20 Oct 24 06:07 UTC] No.41893256[source]▶
Some of it is because many people's only contact with Lisp is via academia, and the academics who teach it actually don't care about developing anything with Lisp. They use it as a vehicle for concepts, and those concepts typically revolve around functional recursion.

The Scheme language and it surrounding culture are also culprits. Though Scheme isn't functional, it emphasizes pure programming more than its Lisp family predecessors. The basic language provides tail recursive constructs instead of iterative ones, and demands implementations to implement optimized tail calls.