Back to Lisp

For quite a few weeks now I have been writing almost no Lisp code in my day job: Java, Javascript, Perl, XSLT, and miscellaneous others have temporarily displaced it (for assorted business reasons). Today, though, I had a bug reported to me, and had to go searching through some Lisp that powers one of my applications.

I've never been so pleased to have a bug reported. My ‘old’* code was elegant, concise, readable, discoverable, and transparent. I don't think I deserve any special credit for this, because I don't observe these qualities in the countless other languages in which I write.

Perl introduces far too many syntax-level abstractions (for example, the special variables like $$) without giving you regular ways to define your own. (It's also unreadable for perfectly obvious reasons.) Java doesn't allow you to introduce useful abstractions, so code is full of boilerplate, delegates, visitors, class hierarchies, accessors, getters, setters, and type declarations. In particular, the lack of generic functions has been an annoyance to me in recent weeks. And of course, XML is not a good substrate for a programming language.

In short, it's just nice to be reading a powerful language again.

* All code that you haven't just written is ‘old’!

Posted at 2007-04-05 16:56:06 by Richard • Link to Back to Lisp
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