Very interesting article on <Ahref=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html”>http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
, I had a wander around the site. It inspired me to want to have a go at Lisp again. Got a nice IDE at <Ahref=“http://www.ufasoft.com/lisp/”>http://www.ufasoft.com/lisp/ (freefor non-commercial use). Found an online tutorial at <Ahref=“http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/lp/node1.html”>http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/lp/node1.html.
I suspect that I do a lot of what he talks about anyway. I use recursion alot, even in Oracle PL/SQL as well as Java and I tend to write things that are reusable and stuff them in libraries, o-o just makes this easier. I love the Lisp idea of being able to write macros that change runtime behaviours. Lisp seems much easier than Ruby. Like a lot of languages I think its simplicity is what makes it so powerful. Writing a language in itself is also good because it makes it easier to understand.
It was interesting that PG puts down his success and rapid software development down to using Lisp, which gives you the power to do prototypes quickly and then get them working. Java is very low-level and the power actually comes from all of the libraries supplied with it. PL/SQL is based on Ada and starts with better constructs (from a Pascal rather than C++ heritage) and much better database binding. For me Java should be calling PL/SQL procedures, I think this would be very fast and allow you to build anything on top of the procedures. Leave the data in the database, how radical.
Ah, maybe a little project for a Lisp interpreter in Java (probably find one in 5 secs on t’internet)…