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Quotes About Lisp

In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a bunch of macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor Kiczales to go out and start a new company, taking months and years and try to get that to work. Lisp still has the advantage there, it's just a question of people wanting that.
~ Peter Norvig
Seibel: One way to resolve that is the way Lisp does—make everything uniformly semiconcise. Where the uniformity has the advantage of allowing users of the language to easily add their own equally uniform, semiconcise, first-class syntactic extensions.
~ Peter Seibel
Deutsch: My PhD thesis was a 600-page Lisp program. I'm a very heavy-duty Lisp hacker from PDP-1 Lisp, Alto Lisp, Byte Lisp, and Interlisp. The reason I don't program in Lisp anymore: I can't stand the syntax. It's just a fact of life that syntax matters.
~ Peter Seibel
Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp.
~ Peter Seibel
I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
~ Paul Graham
Margherita stared at the mask. It was painted bright yellow and marked with little copper-colored circles to suggest florets. White petals streaked with gold radiated out in all directions. Long golden eyelashes fringed the eye slits, and the mouth was painted as a big happy smile. 'La sua bella,' she whispered, her lisp more pronounced than ever.
~ Kate Forsyth
[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.
~ Jamie Zawinski
Farewell, Monsieur Traveler: look you lisp, and wear strange suits, disable all the benefits of your own country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.
~ William Shakespeare
The ARPAnet/PDP-10 culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS and SAIL. The Unix and C crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone connections. And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts bent on taking computer power to the people.
~ Eric S. Raymond
One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.
~ Douglas Hofstadter
We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
~ Alan Perlis
I think all girls secretly want to be actresses because acting seems so glamorous. But as a child, I was always the villager who had one line in the school play. I was shy and I had a bit of a lisp.
~ Hannah Ware
I had gone away from Twitter because before people had been so mean to me. Talking about my lisp and my enormous forehead and all these things. I do have a lisp, I do have a forehead I know you could land a plane on, it's no mystery to me. I just didn't have the skin for it.
~ Sarah Paulson
It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
~ Neal Stephenson
LISP, which was designed to facilitate artificial intelligence research.
~ Walter Isaacson
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.
~ Alan Perlis
Quote may seem a bit of a foreign concept, because few other languages have anything like it. It's closely tied to one of the most distinctive features of Lisp: code and data are made out of the same data structures, and the quote operator is the way we distinguish between them.
~ Paul Graham
If you can't find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software
~ Paul Graham
If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.
~ Paul Graham
Common Lisp is politics, not art.
~ Unknown
JavaScript is not a functional programming language like Lisp or Haskell, but the fact that JavaScript can manipulate functions as objects means that we can use functional programming techniques in JavaScript.
~ Unknown
Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.
~ Larry Wall
Conifer. It's a dynamically typed Lisp without parenthesis tuned for machine learning.
~ Unknown
McCarthy decided that it was time to take that idea and turn it into a whole new language for AI.§ He and his students soon took to calling it List Processor, or Lisp.
~ Unknown