Post #1782110

2026-04-23 01:42 UTC

@mdhughes when Liskov and Guttag talk about "extremely high level implementation languages" as being an unweildly idea, this is specifically a euphemism used for lisp / common lisp. The meaning of extremely high level is that a language has so many features cooked in, you would mostly never use external packages as a basis for your own software. It occured to me that lisp is an extremely high level language, whereas scheme is a high level language

Replies (2)

@screwlisp@gamerplus.org 2026-04-23 01:43

@mdhughes hence scheme assumes you are bringing in libraries particular to what you are doing, whereas hypothetically common lisp starts out by having support for more things than rnrses do. This is basically an arguement against using quicklisp/maybe even asdf in common lisp for the most part.

Open ##1782111
@mdhughes@appdot.net 2026-04-23 02:06

@screwlisp I think a lot of it is just writing for research & a teaching class, not for production. CLU is a good set of primitives for that, but nobody ever wrote libraries against it, there was only one impl & only on VAX. Scheme is a MUCH better teaching language, & also had a production-quality impl, on micro-computers, & libraries. LISP is too huge to teach, it's fine having all the features but they aren't organized in any way.

Open ##1782113