The creator of my favourite programming language passed away yesterday. Lisp is, in my view, the best language ever devised. Sadly, too few in the computer industry realize or comprehend this fact. Lisp, and its descendants such as Scheme, are beautifully consistent programming languages wherein the programs and the data are defined identically and as such can be manipulated similarly. This allows one to generate code easily that can then be executed. Most people stare at Lisp-like languages and can’t get past the parentheses. Ironically, most every language uses parentheses of one sort or another. If one does a quick comparison with C, for example, one will quickly realize that Lisp doesn’t have that many more parentheses than does C. And with C, you can’t work in a fully interactive environment wherein you develop your code and test it all in a fully integrated way. Instead, you’re still stuck with the stupid edit-compile-run-debug cycle that made sense when we used punch cards but doesn’t today. Even “modern” languages such as Java are really only prettied up C, though truth be told, I’d rather code in C because it’s powerful and puts the onus on the programmer to do things right
