Comment by oppositelock
7 years ago
Lisp is very valuable in the concepts which it teaches; expression trees and their inherent parallelism, functions without side-effects, structured data definition, lazy evaluation.
I've been programming for about 30 years, and did a fair bit of scheme, then lisp early on. I no longer use it, and it's not a great modern language for a lot of internet or IO stuff, but as a data transformation language, few are its equal. I still apply what I learned from lisp to write better code in Java, Go, Python. It puts you into a mindset of using composition of simple functions and data structures, which will generally lead to better code in any language.
> it's not a great modern language for a lot of internet or IO stuff
I think Clojure is a great language for internet stuff and possibly great even for IO stuff too, depending on what you mean by that. The LISP-iness is probably better for the former but builtin Java interop probably goes a long way towards being pretty-good for the latter.
What exactly were you thinking-of by "IO stuff"? Graphics? Embedded systems programming? I'd think Clojure could be just as good as Java or Python for all of those, tho existing libraries aren't going to be quite as good as C/C++, and Go will probably be better-performing generally.
And there are (because of course there are) LISPs for real-time embedded systems programming:
- [nakkaya/ferret: Ferret is a free software lisp implementation for real time embedded control systems.](https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret)