
Things that other languages should take from Lisp - iamelgringo
http://repinvariant.blogspot.com/2008/01/thoughts-on-lisp-things-that-other.html
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bayareaguy
\- Bignums

\- Optional type declarations

\- Proper (unbounded) tail-recursion

\- Methods with multiple-dispatch

\- Speed

\- Syntactic simplicity (i.e. few ideosyncractic syntactic rules)

What a weird set of choices.

Whenever I switch from lisp to something else, the first thing I miss is how
easy it is to express the problem solution as a program and as a data
structure at the same time. I immediately miss defmacro but I don't find
myself wondering where my multiple-dispatch went.

~~~
plinkplonk
"express the problem solution as a program and as a data structure at the same
time."

exactly . "At the same time" is key. Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial
Intelligence Programming" has some good examples of this technique.

