Saturday, January 07, 2006

A Different Kind of Language

I used to say all programming langauges were the same. "Yeah, what's the difference between C, Java, Pascal and Basic? Some use squiggly brackets, some use begin/end, some use two equals signs, some use ":=". But apart from that they all boil down to pretty much the same thing."

That was until I discovered Lisp. I've only started even looking at it in the last few days, but I've learnt enough to know that all programming languages are not the same. Obviously I'd heard of Lisp; I've been programming for enough years now to have heard of all these strange old languages (Fortan, Algol etc..) that they used in the 60's, but never thought anything of actually using them. However, from what I've read, Lisp's power seems to be a well-kept secret by the Lisp community designed to give them the advantage. Their secret is out now, and as soon as I get my head round Lisp enough to actually write something more than Hello World, you'll be the first to know.

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