Recumbant Blogger

Everybody has heard of Lisp. Perhaps they’ve ignored it, but at least they’ve heard of it. It remains a unique language just for having persisted so long without going mainstream; and for being the only language I’ve heard of which has dialects — ala Scheme or Common Lisp or Clojure, which are all languages in their own right, but which all also share a common lispy syntax.

Lisp introduced garbage collection and first class functions, and literal data types (the proverbial “list” in Lisp) fifty years ago — long before these features started showing up in mainstream languages like Java or Python. It’s the original: the real mccoy. It had it all way before anybody else did. It’s forgotten more than mainstream languages ever learned.

Unfortunately, despite being oh so excellent, poor adoption by the mainstream has negatively effected the language. Common Lisp and Scheme lack libraries compared to other languages; there is no CPAN equivalent. As a efficiency minded programmer, you’d do better assembling Lego blocks in Java than writing it all from scratch in Scheme.

But what makes Lisp the 100 year language–the undying, unkillable, everlasting language–is that whenever a new paradigm comes along, somebody writes a new lisp (or an extension of an old lisp) to absorb that new paradigm as a first class feature of the language. As an example, Common Lisp was adapted to include Object Oriented programming, with CLOS (Common Lisp Object System.) Now the latest thing is concurrency, and lisp has an answer!

Clojure is a Lisp with strong concurrency semantics. It can handle scaling an application to many cores, and it interoperates seamlessly with the gazillions of Java libraries out there. You can have Lisp, and your Lego blocks too!