| Slava Akhmechet |
The Nature of Lisp
Look! Up in the sky! It's Ant! It's XML! It's a preprocessor! It's Lisp!!! The enlightenment came instantaneously. One moment I understood nothing, and the next moment everything clicked into place. I've achieved nirvana. |
|---|---|
| Paul Graham |
Programming Bottom-Up
In Lisp, you don't just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward your program.... In the end your program will look as if the language had been designed for it. |
| Richard Stallman |
My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs
A talk about the history of Emacs, Lisp, and free software. |
| Richard Gabriel & Kent Pitman |
Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells
The classic, authoritative discussion of Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2, i.e. namespaces in Lisp.
The bulk of arguments that focus on clean semantics and notational simplicity tend to favor uniting the function and value namespaces. In spite of this, there are those who hold strongly to a belief that a two-namespace system affords useful expressive power that they are unwilling to do without.It would also help to introduce case sensitivity. That way, a list in a Lisp-1 can be called "List" instead of "l" or "lst". Macros could even be spelled in ALL_CAPS, for people who worry about confusing macros and functions. |