

What do you think about newLISP, a scripting language that claims to be a LISP dialect? - aaco

I'd like to hear opinions, impressions, criticism about it. Would it be a considerable language for professional or secure programs?<p>For those who still don't know it: http://www.newlisp.org/
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Shooter
[Diplomatic Hat On] I would personally stick with a Scheme or with one of the
better CLs (SBCL, etc.) over newLISP.

NewLISP is interesting for the space it occupies and it can be fun, but it
also has some really wonky ideas that I think are mistakes and that will make
it more difficult for you to grok other Lisps in the future. It is not a
horrible language, but I think a person's time would be much better spent
learning another Lisp. I would suggest that you Google comp.lang.lisp for
newLISP. That should provide you with plenty of 'criticism' to digest. Several
other people have asked the exact same question before on comp.lang.lisp.

Then, go to: <http://gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/> once you've moved on ;-)

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aaco
Thanks for the advice.

Actually I'm already studying Common Lisp (from the Practical common Lisp
book), and, well, I really liked its concepts. And surely, it can be used for
practical purposes. It's a different and old language, I believe it's worthy
to be studied.

~~~
Shooter
Cool.

PCL is a great book. And, yes, CL is incredibly practical for many purposes.
PCL/CL are much more worthy of your time than newLISP.

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Hexstream
First and foremost, I think "newLISP" is an horrible name. What will they do
when "newLISP" is 10 years old? Or maybe they don't expect it to survive that
long?...

~~~
aaco
Heh, actually it already reached that point, more than 10 years old I think.

From [http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2007/04/19/interview-with-
lutz-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2007/04/19/interview-with-lutz-mueller-
creator-of-newlisp/)

"Lutz: newLISP started on SunBSD in the early 90's, then moved to Windows
3.0/1 as a 16-bit application, then to Windows 95/98 as a 32-bit program.
During all that time newLISP was more like a hobby for me. Around 1999/2000 I
made it Open-Source under the GPL license on Linux."

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km
Depends on what you want it to do. Do you want to learn LISP or do you want
newLISP to do a particular task? As a scripting language it does it's job very
nice. I first started to use it when I needed a small, but flexible language
that worked well on Windows. newLISP does the job just right.

A nice feature is the ability to compile a newLISP script to a standalone
executable that does not require a newLISP interpreter. I hacked together a
quick and dirsty script that my colleages at work like a lot - a script that
cleans up crap in their windows profile directory. :-)

I have no experience with other LISPs though, and thus am not competent to say
whether newLISP is a "true" LISP. To me that really does not matter - as long
as the tool does the job.

Good luck.

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dag
No gensym is an annoying decision to work around. Yeah you can hack it in,
but...

If you want to use a lisp then choose the one with the most vitality, aka
SBCL.

