Ventonegro

And anyway, the subject line presupposes that Lisp has not caught on. This is like saying that astrophysics or calculus or brain surgery has not caught on because in relative numbers, there might be more people doing other things. The success of Lisp is not measured in the number of people using it, it’s measured in the utility to those people who do use it. Turning it into C (or C++ or C#) to make it more popular would not be success. In the world’s menu of computer language options, we don’t need them all to be Taco Bell.

Browsing the web today I found an interesting poster about programming paradigms. Interestingly, it puts Java right there with OCaml in the state + closures section, and Java does not have closures. But since there is no OOP in the poster, I assume the author is equaling closures to objects, which according to some is very wise.

As part of my Lisp studies, I have implemented a toy Scheme interpreter in roughly 1000 lines of Lua. It is here. It supports tail-call optimisation, lexical scope for closures, and first-class continuations via call/cc.

I have departed from the traditional approach of implementing a Scheme interpreter in Scheme itself because I wanted to avoid possible confusions between the defined language and the defining language. This has made a lot of the concepts clearer. The evaluator is written in continuation-passing style, which is easily done in Lua because the latter has tail-call optimisations. This way it is easier to reify continuations to first-class values.

I have also added a few primitives to allow me to run some examples, as the factorial and fibonacci functions. More primitives can be easily added if desired.