> I've always wondered why LISP was such a hot-topic of discussion for CS people.
Because in a discussion with five CS people, only one has actual real Lisp programming experience, one has some freshman experience in some professor's one-weekend Lisp-like dialect where a run-time type error segfaults, and the other three have different misconceptions about what Lisp is.
The number of times I've mentioned common lisp and gotten "Oh yeah, that's the language with no loops, just recursion, right?" does sadden me a bit.
To clear it up for anyone reading this:
Scheme has tail-call elimination as a requirement of the language; common lisp does not, and even includes an (overly?) sophisticated DSL for iteration in the standard library.
Also 95% of what you learned about lisp in your "Survey of programing languages" course was wrong.
The loop macro may be described as overly sophisticated. However, I can't help but get a chuckle with how much all of the new "stream" based mechanisms in java[1] mimic it. Ironically, with what appears to be more parens.
To be fair, the LOOP facilities are ridiculously complex. Similarly so are the FORMAT facilities.
I regret not knowing more about them as a younger programmer. Most of the "power" of lisp is always shown in the ability to compose programs out of forms. It is amazing how much code you can avoid writing by just using either loop or format. Or both.
I'd be interested to see some data on what the real ratio is.
I suspect that 1 in 5 might actually be high, which IMHO is sad -- not because I think less of those without any kind of Lisp experience, but because I think they are seriously missing out.
For any CS folks (or just developers in general) who have thought about learning a Lisp of some sort, but for some reason have never gotten it done, I would encourage you to do so -- it really is worth the effort.
I know; if any random sample of five CS people could be expected to have 0.9 to 1.1 Lispers in it with a 19/20 confidence, that would be a different world, ha!
Universities sometimes do their fair share to screw this up even further. In my Alma Mater, there is this famous PhD who managed to discourage a generation of students from Lisp by the sole virtue of how she did the classes. :/.
Because in a discussion with five CS people, only one has actual real Lisp programming experience, one has some freshman experience in some professor's one-weekend Lisp-like dialect where a run-time type error segfaults, and the other three have different misconceptions about what Lisp is.