(begin (display "just another Perl hacker") (newline))

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. While you bash Lisp, the great Perl hackers are trying hard to imitate it.

Lisp was the first language implemented in itself -- the first one to have an eval function at all!
Lexical scope and closures (my() and anonymous subs, respectively) were invented in Scheme (25 years ago).
Lispers were early adopters of OO. In the early 70's we already had excellent OO extensions such as LOOPS, and today's full-featured Common Lisp specification includes a Common Lisp Object System which is incredibly complete and flexible (not to mention complex!).
Where'd you think map() came from? What about grep()? (Of course, it's called filter in scheme...)
Hell, even the idea of lhs subroutine calls (new as of Perl 5.6) came up in Lisp - some good 30 years ago, even! But why linger in the past? :) The features which are standard in R5RS-compliant Scheme implementations today (e.g. continuations, promises, hygienic macros, even the trivial but enormously useful let variants for scoping with variables), as well as some of the nicer ones from particular extensions (e.g. logical programming and soft pattern-matching-based typing as in Schelog) just might find their way into Perl 7.0, ten years from now. (Only in an uglier, more C-ish way, of course. :))

Comment on (begin (display "just another Perl hacker") (newline))

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(begin (display "D'oh...")) by Anonymous Monk on May 25, 2000 at 00:33 UTC
Evidently I'm a big idiot, as I closed the <UL> tag too late. Here it is, reformatted: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. While you bash Lisp, the great Perl hackers are trying hard to imitate it. Lisp was the first language implemented in itself -- the first one to have an eval function at all! Lexical scope and closures (my() and anonymous subs, respectively) were invented in Scheme (25 years ago). Lispers were early adopters of OO. In the early 70's we already had excellent OO extensions such as LOOPS, and today's full-featured Common Lisp specification includes a Common Lisp Object System which is incredibly complete and flexible (not to mention complex!). Where'd you think map() came from? What about grep()? (Of course, it's called filter in scheme...) Hell, even the idea of lhs subroutine calls (new as of Perl 5.6) came up in Lisp - some good 30 years ago, even! But why linger in the past? :) The features which are standard in R5RS-compliant Scheme implementations today (e.g. continuations, promises, hygienic macros, even the trivial but enormously useful let variants for scoping with variables), as well as some of the nicer ones from particular extensions (e.g. logical programming and soft pattern-matching-based typing as in Schelog) just might find their way into Perl 7.0, ten years from now. (Only in an uglier, more C-ish way, of course. :)) There it is now... :)	[reply]
RE: (begin (display "just another Perl hacker") (newline)) by Adam (Vicar) on May 25, 2000 at 00:28 UTC
So I ran your post through my LISP compiler and it complained about mismatched-parens. Ok, I was joking. (I know Lisp has its uses. (My AI class in college was taught in Lisp, as were several other courses.) But it gets so convoluted (and complicated) so quickly, what with all those parens (and lambdas (and lets (and prefix notation(although prefix notation is more literal))))).	[reply]
RE: (begin (display "just another Perl hacker") (newline)) by KM (Priest) on May 25, 2000 at 00:31 UTC
What the hell are you talking about? Who is bashing Lisp? Nothing is wrong with Lisp (meaning it has its uses). Perl is know for, and was partially born from, taking what is best in various languages and put them together. Are you next going to say we are trying to immitate C? Cheers, KM	[reply]
RE: RE: (begin (display "just another Perl hacker") (newline)) by Anonymous Monk on May 25, 2000 at 23:13 UTC
KM asked "who is bashing Lisp?" Quoth Adam in the OP: almost every language {except lisp} that is in use is in use for a good reason. There.	[reply]