The Roots of Lisp

The roots of Lisp

Paul Graham shows no this paper once again why Lisp is such a power language. Paul shows a series of highlights where he tries to tell us some of Lisp's main pros against other "common and mortal" languages. An interesting point to keep in mind is the amount of credit Paul gives to McCarthy, who as we have discussed before, was the theoretical creator of Lisp. Paul Graham shows a great level of worshipness and acknowledgment as he even says McCarthy is as important toprogramming as Euclid is in geometry. 

According to Paul Graham, best programming languages are C and Lisp. Now that I have some knowledge on Lisp and been coding on one of its derivative languages, Clojure; I know that is not false at all. Personally I think Lisp and every language derived from this one is the ammount of abstraction built into the compiler so that multiple datatypes can be evaluated in the same way without having to worry about conversions, datatypes, memory, etc. However, I think and can certainly give credit to the architecture of all functional languages instead of just Lisp. 

Instead, Graham gives all credit to Lisp handling all expressions as lists, where the operators mainly occupy the first element in a list. However, we can actually see this operators from a different perspective, a bit more like functions. This emphatizes another Lisp great feature, which is that is functional.

In conclusion, Lisp main feature is its design and achitecture. How functions are evaluated allows programmers to comprehend more, how the code is working. This also translated into the ability to create macros.