Re: What makes different things lispy or unlispy?

On Jun 28, 1:33 pm, Vsevolod Dyomkin <vselo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 25, 7:46 pm, Dmitry Dzhus <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



Hi lispers!

What makes you consider something lispy or unlispy?

What is the spirit of Lisp?

Recently a Lisp hacker called my code un-lispy and that left me
questioning why.

The problem was that I pulled some sort of C-like notation to address
recursive data structures into Lisp land by writing a function which
acts as follows:

    (get-field basket ".apples[0].taste")
    =>
    delicious

Where `basket` is:

    (setq basket '((apples . (((color . green)
                               (taste . delicious))
                              ((color . red)
                               (taste . disgusting))))))

I didn't fully like this notation myself, but I thought that it's good
because it's short and compact.

Would this function be more lispy if it was written to work this way:

    (get-field basket 'apples 0 'taste)
    =>
    delicious

?

I've been playing with Lisp for nearly two years know, but the further
I learn, the more confused about the answer to my question I get.

I think that lispy means living and flexible. Another (funny)
interpretations include unlispy meaning having not enought parentheses
(I think this one is Siebel's).

I relied on strings in my code, and it looks like that it lowered
lispyness of my program. As Perlis once said, strings are stark. What
may this mean in the context of Lisp?

Let me know what you think about all this.
--
Happy Hacking.

http://sphinx.net.ru
む

There's a good rant by late Erik Naggum, which can shed a little light
on what's lispy (in comparison to other approaches, in this case --
the Unix one)

Best regards,
Vsevolod Dyomkin

and the link was: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/7c588cdb91a10d4d
.

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