The Roots of Lisp

“The Roots of Lisp” is an article by Paul Graham which talks about the benefits of Lisp, but this time, this articles is more of a practical reading, because we actually could see lisp code and the explanation behind each statement. I like this approach because past article were pages long with lots of redundant information in some cases, or I could use an example to fully get the idea or the concept on the article, but this article is very concise and to the point, I could even try the code by myself if I wanted to.

Using some lisp operations, John McCarthy wrote the eval function which is a function that works as an interpreter for the language. The awesome thing is that it is written in the same language, Lisp that is, so using the same tools the languages provided, McCarthy wrote a function that could execute the same Lisp code. That shows how powerful Lisp could be compared to some other languages.

Although it was good to see some code instead of the thousand pages of plain text on the previous articles, this articles need more attention to get all the code concepts and to fully understand it, which could seem like it is a difficult text, but to actually see how eval works, we could understand better the language and have the idea of what’s under the hood of the lisp functions, which could be useful because once we know how something works, we tend to use it more like it is supposed to been used.

I think lisp is a good language to know because it's challenging and forces the developer to open the way of solving a specific problem, like we’ve seen on the past articles, lisp could be still used for development as it has a lot of advantages when compared to other languages.

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