Lisp Philosophy Debates
This cluster focuses on discussions about Lisp's core characteristics, such as its lack of syntax, homoiconicity ('code as data'), functional vs. imperative paradigms, historical definitions, and what qualifies as a true Lisp dialect like Clojure or Common Lisp.
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"Lisp looks strange not so much because it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed, and these trees are made of lists, which are Lisp data structures"
It's basically a lisp with better syntax.
Is lisp considered a functional language? I thought it more imperative
In what sense is Lisp not an imperative language?
Well, "Lisp" is a language family rather than a specific language. Although it's culturally drawn toward functional programming, Common Lisp is more or less an imperative language with first-class functions, much like Python is. Its designers chose this approach because they wanted it to be a "big tent" language that imposes few opinions on the programmer. Other Lisps like Clojure and Racket went in a different direction.
In what way is it a lisp? It's based on symbolic rewriting, not lambda calculus. These are entirely different things.
Do you condsider Lisp far from C?
Does it mean that Lisps 'code is data' is the right idea in the end?
It can indeed! Both lisp and prolog are homoiconic :)
So Lisp is not a functional language...