Though it was posted over a year ago, I just read an article by Eric Kidd over at Random Hacks titled Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP. It appears to be one of several “is (not) an acceptable” entires related to Lisp on Reddit. Anyway, Eric gives a good match-up between these two languages. Lisp is the über-cool and Ruby is the über-popular.
I read this article for two reasons:
1) I’ve been (very, very) slowly working my way towards fluency in Ruby. This was primarily brought about by joining the Ruby on Rails trial bandwagon. That initial motivation has since been taken over an actual desire to learn more about this great programming language.
2) After reading a great deal of Paul Graham articles, he made me curious about Lisp. Paul used Lisp to create the very first e-commerce site. That application was later sold to Yahoo! and became what is now Yahoo! Stores. If I remember correctly, the code base has since been migrated off Lisp, somewhat to Paul’s lament and much to Yahoo!’s chagrin. (side note: I find it humorous, Paul still uses the Yahoo! “Y logo” for the favicon on his site.)
I certainly don’t “know” Lisp, but the big deal I keep reading about it is being able to write macros. Macros give you, among other things, the ability to create your own mini-languages for specific tasks. Eric goes through this much better than I, so I recommend you read his article for a better technical discussion. At the same time, I’m well aware of the power of this capability, and Ruby definitely seems to have most of it already under its belt.
This was an interesting read to see the two languages I’m most curious about these days stacked up against each other. I had been unsuccessful in wrapping my head around some of the syntax and abilities of Lisp before seeing this article. I’m still working on things, but maybe I’ll become a real hacker one day and actually learn Lisp. Ruby is all I’ve got for now.
0 Comments.