Books of Note

Practical Common
LispThe best intro to start your journey. Excellent coverage of CLOS.

ANSI Common
LispAnother great starting point with a different focus.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence
ProgrammingA superb set of Lisp examples. Not just for the AI crowd.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

D: By Jove, they almost have it! 

When I first saw C++ back in the mid-1980s, it looked pretty interesting. Then it started to grow into a horrible monster. I was just reading about the D programming language today. All I can say is, "Wow!" I wish they had this way back when. This would seem to correct most of what I find distasteful about C, C++, and Java, while keeping most of the things I like--to the point where I would actually consider using it for certain projects.

The things I hate most about those programming languages are:

C

C++

Java

In short, D looks interesting. Is it Lisp and would I go back to using D as my main programming language? No. It still doesn't have macros the way Lisp does and it doesn't have sexprs (yes, I really do like the parenthesis), but it is a better follow-on to C than C++ and still hits the system-programming domain that Java missed so bady. It seems like something to keep in one's hip pocket.


Comments:


Having to run in a VM with bytecodes even when you're writing something for a single platform and don't need or want to.

Considering that one could compile Java to the native code with GCJ(free) or other similar technologies for years, this is a strange statement.
 


Realize that GCJ only recently got good enough that it could actually compile programs of substance. As of 3 or 4 years ago, that wasn't an option. I agree that as of today this is less of an issue.
 

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