Before I proceed with some things I wanted to add another answer for, here’s one more reference — the part related to homoiconicity is fairly short, but it is Rich Hickey doing the explaining! Channel 9 has this nice video with Rich Hickey and Brian Beckman talking about Clojure. Concurrency is, understandably, the major focus, … Read more
Wikipedia and the Google Common Lisp Style guide both suggest .lisp. Practical Common Lisp suggests .lisp or .cl. Note, I’m not a Common Lisp programmer by any measure, so I have no idea if .lisp is actually used in practice.
LLVM provides a lot, but it’s still only a small part of the runtime a functional language needs. And C FFI calls are uncomplicated because LLVM leaves memory management to be handled by someone else. Interacting the Garbage Collector is what makes FFI calls difficult in languages such as Scheme. You might be interested in … Read more
What’s going on? You say: feel like there is nothing special is going on here. The outer foo in bar increments the global x, and foo surrounded by let in bar increments the shadowed x. What’s the big deal? The special that’s going on here is that LET can shadow the value of *x*. With … Read more
Emacs. At least parts of it are written in Emacs Lisp.
You would use apply, if the number of arguments to pass to the function is not known at compile-time (sorry, don’t know Clojure syntax all that well, resorting to Scheme): (define (call-other-1 func arg) (func arg)) (define (call-other-2 func arg1 arg2) (func arg1 arg2)) As long as the number of arguments is known at compile … Read more
You have several answers here, but none is really comprehensive (and I’m not talking about having enough details or being long enough). First of all, the bottom line: you should not use Common Lisp if you want to have a good experience with SICP. If you don’t know much Common Lisp, then just take it … Read more
Consider learning it. If for no other reason then because you can actually use it in a real project. You : Can I use this small Java library called Clojure? Boss: Why do you need it? You : For some concurrency improvements. Boss: Ok.
DEFPARAMETER always assigns a value. So: [1]> (defparameter a 1) A [2]> (defparameter a 2) A [3]> a 2 while DEFVAR does it only once, so: [4]> (defvar b 1) B [5]> (defvar b 2) B [6]> b 1 SETF is a macro which uses SETQ internally, but has more possibilities. In a way it’s … Read more
In the words of Bill Clinton, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. Well, ok, not really, but it does depend on what the meaning of the word “homoiconic” is. This term is sufficiently controversial that we no longer say that Julia is homoiconic – so you can decide for yourself whether … Read more