Ooh! Ooh! My turn! Why Lisp?

Brace yourself. The first reason you should be using Lisp is a non-reason, an answer to an objection, a negation, a let-down: Lisp is just an ordinary programming language.

I'll wait while you pick yourself off the floor. What a terrible place to start! But it must be said. It is the first hurdle on the road to Lisp. Xenophobia never feels like fear of the strange, it feels like dislike. But one of the best young Lispers to show up at a Lisp-NYC meeting sat down, ordered a beer, and was smart enough to make it his first question: Can you use Lisp for conventional programming? Can it read a database? Can it run a GUI?

Yep.

Lisp at one level of understanding is just a normal high level programming language. Those parentheses look quite different but constitute only a superficial difference from the conventional chicken scratch syntax of semi-colons, braces, full stops, and brackets. When a conventional programmer sits down to program Lisp, they feel quickly at home: Lisp is just another 3GL.

I feel terrible about this. I am supposed to be up on a soapbox preaching eternal salvation and ecstasies glorious and unknown and we will touch on that below but in the end your correspondent is just a simple application programmer and if you check my Road to Lisp you will discover that I (re)discovered Lisp just to find an easier way to create educational math software.

Lispers are accused of religous fanaticism and zealotry -- nope, our enthusiasm is all about getting applications built faster with less pain. Which brings me to the bad news: the next reason I have to offer for using Lisp is almost as boring as the first: Lisp is mature. Turns fifty or so in 2008. In 1994 when it was old enough to be President of the United States it got an ANSI Standard. How stable can you get?

So far we have ordinary, old, and codified and I am losing my audience. Send in the clowns!

Fine, a little pizazz: it ain't just old. The old translates to polish. Lisp did not begin with a standard and it did not begin as a single-implementation BDFL strangulation such as Python or Perl or Ruby. It began as...an experiment?

Two score and ten years ago our foregeeks started from the simple idea that code and data were one and began evolving a huge tool chest of HLL functionality spread across several competing dialects. For some reason they took the engineering so seriously that whenever a nooby picks up one of these tools surprise! surprise! it turns out to work precisely the way they need it to. It seems like magic but it is not. The magic is just a long history of use and careful refinement by very good engineers and was possible precisely because there was no standard and there was no BDFL.

Back to the yawns: most Common Lisp implementations are native compiled. Yeah, yeah, I know, computers are fast and we are all doing Web apps where network latency decides all but I work on a desktop interactive expert system that needs all the horsepower it can get and to tell you the truth when building something like that more horsepower makes more better features possible so isn't it nice to compile down to the metal?

More yawns: ephemeral GC, the best OO model you can imagine, multiple implementations to choose from including free ones.... hey, even I am getting bored. But my Road also reveals that I stumbled onto this staid dependable workhorse only after squandering mucho dollars and hours on half-baked gleams-in-the-eye programming tools that promised a world of productivity and delivered only reboots. At which point boring looks pretty damn exciting.

Left as an exercise is connecting the stable/standard/refined dot with other dots of dynamic interactive languages still emerging from sea and periodically burying their installed bases in volcanic ash. Can you scream Perl 6? Sher ya can. Has Guido finally axed first-class functions yet? It is fun watching languages evolve, but if you will excuse me I really do have an application to get out.

With the dull stuff out of the way we can indulge at long last in some Why Lisp? fireworks.

We'll build slowly, starting with Lisp being interactive, dynamic, reflective, functional, compiled, mature, standardized, has a vast array of library functions and data structures (including the wonderful and ubiquitous list), multiple value return, special variables, CLOS (including multiple inheritance and multi-methods), the MOP, first-class functions and omigod! closures, destructuring-bind, LOOP, lexical scope, untyped variables, typed data, object identity for everything but numbers and characters and now repeat a few of those things a few times to make clear how helpful they are to getting applications built, such as the vast toolchest. Gasp.

I call that starting slowly because everything above can be found in some language. It is wonderful that only Common Lisp has them all, but is there anything that really sets Lisp off? Is there some protein that cannot be mimicked by other invading dynamic language organisms, some shibboleth their tongues cannot form?

More prosaically, is there some quality those languages cannot copy without becoming Lisp?

At ILC 2002 former Lisp giant now Python advocate Peter Norvig was for some reason allowed to give the keynote address like Martin Luther leading Easter Sunday mass at the Vatican and pitching Protestantism because in his talk Peter bravely repeated his claim that Python is a Lisp.

When he finished Peter took questions and to my surprise called first on the rumpled old guy who had wandered in just before the talk began and eased himself into a chair just across the aisle from me and a few rows up.

This guy had wild white hair and a scraggly white beard and looked hopelessly lost as if he had gotten separated from the tour group and wandered in mostly to rest his feet and just a little to see what we were all up to. My first thought was that he would be terribly disappointed by our bizarre topic and my second thought was that he would be about the right age, Stanford is just down the road, I think he is still at Stanford -- could it be?

"Yes, John?" Peter said.

I won't pretend to remember Lisp inventor John McCarthy's exact words which is odd because there were only about ten but he simply asked if Python could gracefully manipulate Python code as data.

"No, John, it can't," said Peter and nothing more, graciously assenting to the professor's critique, and McCarthy said no more though Peter waited a moment to see if he would and in the silence a thousand words were said.

Come to think of it...