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digitalmars.D - D and Lisp

reply Denton Cockburn <diboss hotmail.com> writes:
Hey guys,

I'm in University and am about to start my Ph.D.
I know Lisp, and I've been on the D newsgroup for a few months following 
its growth. For ones that know Lisp, what can you say is the experience 
programming in D compared to programming in Lisp?  What are some of the 
frustrations of D in comparison? Some of the joys?  What do you most miss 
from Lisp that you wish D had?

I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work.
Should I delve fully into D, or run with Lisp?
What would you use to convince a Lisper to try D?

Hope that wasn't too many questions.
Jul 16 2007
next sibling parent BCS <ao pathlink.com> writes:
Reply to Denton,


 Hey guys,
 
 I'm in University and am about to start my Ph.D.
 I know Lisp, and I've been on the D newsgroup for a few months
 following
 its growth. For ones that know Lisp, what can you say is the
 experience
 programming in D compared to programming in Lisp?  What are some of
 the
 frustrations of D in comparison? Some of the joys?  What do you most
 miss
 from Lisp that you wish D had?
 I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work.
 Should I delve fully into D, or run with Lisp?
 What would you use to convince a Lisper to try D?
 Hope that wasn't too many questions.
 


Well, IMHO the part of D that gets the closet to Lisp is template programming 
stuff. The first time I really "got" template programming was when I was 
in the middle of learning scheme. It would be rather interesting to show 
that most of Lisp (enough to be Turing compleat?) can be translated into 
D templates.
Jul 16 2007
prev sibling next sibling parent reply torhu <no spam.invalid> writes:
Denton Cockburn wrote:

 Hey guys,
 
 I'm in University and am about to start my Ph.D.
 I know Lisp, and I've been on the D newsgroup for a few months following 
 its growth. For ones that know Lisp, what can you say is the experience 
 programming in D compared to programming in Lisp?  What are some of the 
 frustrations of D in comparison? Some of the joys?  What do you most miss 
 from Lisp that you wish D had?
 
 I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work.
 Should I delve fully into D, or run with Lisp?
 What would you use to convince a Lisper to try D?
 
 Hope that wasn't too many questions.


Maybe this'll interest you:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/lisp-java-d.html
Jul 17 2007
parent Denton Cockburn <diboss hotmail.com> writes:
On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:53:44 +0200, torhu wrote:


 Denton Cockburn wrote:

 Hey guys,
 
 I'm in University and am about to start my Ph.D. I know Lisp, and I've
 been on the D newsgroup for a few months following its growth. For ones
 that know Lisp, what can you say is the experience programming in D
 compared to programming in Lisp?  What are some of the frustrations of
 D in comparison? Some of the joys?  What do you most miss from Lisp
 that you wish D had?
 
 I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work. Should I delve
 fully into D, or run with Lisp? What would you use to convince a Lisper
 to try D?
 
 Hope that wasn't too many questions.


 
 Maybe this'll interest you:
 http://www.digitalmars.com/d/lisp-java-d.html


I read this before.  I guess I was looking for something more 'direct'.
More of a comparison from one who has used both...how the experience 
differs.  So far in my learning of D I have:

Lisp:
smaller syntax
clearer and easier to use function library (hyperspec)
dynamic typing

D:
speed
easier distribution (i.e. EXEs)


D's syntax and rules are a lot harder to follow than Lisp's so far.  Lisp 
failures lie in its difficulty in distributing apps.
I don't know either in depth enough to go deeper in analysis.  That's why 
I'd like the input of more experienced individuals than myself :-)
Jul 17 2007
prev sibling next sibling parent BLS <nanali nospam-wanadoo.fr> writes:
Denton Cockburn schrieb:

 I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work.
 Should I delve fully into D, or run with Lisp?


Hi Denton,
why not using both ?

quote :
DLISP is an implementation of a Lisp dialect written in D, to leverage 
the build-in memory management and hash-table support of the associative 
arrays.

dle.d - Or dLISP Environment is a read-eval-print loop, suitable for end
users and debugging.

tlisp.d - Is to be the linkable library for embedding dLISP in other
projects (Non D as well).

http://www.dsource.org/projects/dlisp

HTH Bjoern.
Jul 17 2007
prev sibling parent Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+spam com.gmail> writes:
Denton Cockburn wrote:

 Hey guys,
 
 I'm in University and am about to start my Ph.D.
 I know Lisp, and I've been on the D newsgroup for a few months following 
 its growth. For ones that know Lisp, what can you say is the experience 
 programming in D compared to programming in Lisp?  What are some of the 
 frustrations of D in comparison? Some of the joys?  What do you most miss 
 from Lisp that you wish D had?
 
 I'm trying to decide which to use for my thesis work.
 Should I delve fully into D, or run with Lisp?
 What would you use to convince a Lisper to try D?
 
 Hope that wasn't too many questions.


D is likely by far the closest to LISP of the static (non-dynamic) 
family languages.
D has advanced meta-programming capabilities. It also lambdas (called 
function/delegate literals in D) but they currently have some 
restrictions: delegate literals that access function contexts are not 
valid after the function returns, since function contexts are 
stack-allocated (and not heap-allocated like in Lisp). This is planned 
to be fixed eventually.
You should also be mindful of int and float arithmetic, since these 
types cannot hold a number of any size, something which for what I've 
been told, many Lispers find extremely unclean. But since D has operator 
overloading, you can create a BigNum like class and work with it almost 
as easily as a primitive numerical type.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D
Jul 18 2007