post-with-headers.textile (1285B)
1 title: What I miss most about Lisp 2 author: Daniel Barlow 3 date: Sat Apr 30 23:23:33 2011 4 X-Parrot: norweigan blue 5 6 first content line 7 8 It's been three months since I wrote anything longer than one line in 9 Lisp, and over a year since I wrote more than a screenful of the 10 stuff. 11 12 What I miss most is not CLOS or the REPL or even macros (per se, 13 anyway). It's 14 15 * the distinction between READ and EVAL: a sane syntax for 16 constructing complex data structures that look like code, but 17 without actually having the data structures in question interpreted 18 19 * and backtraces with the values of function parameters in them. When 20 you're doing the same thing 1000 times to different database rows or 21 objects in a collection, and one of them has a @nil@ in it 22 somewhere, it would be really nice to know *which* one. 23 24 And maybe the REPL (although irb does most of that). And kinda sorta 25 Defsystem, but I seem to be in the process of 26 "reimplementing that":https://github.com/telent/projectr ... 27 28 But I hope soon to get Rubinius installed, just because I still have 29 the irrational opinion that a grown-up programming language ought to 30 be able to implement itself (and I have a _thing_ for native code) so 31 project 1 there is to see if I can hack the backtrace thingy at least 32 into it. 33 34