Roots of Lisp

What a find remarkable of the paper that I just read, is the idea of creating such a powerful language, with its own language. To me that is such an elegant solution.

I didn’t get to use Lisp in a professional environment due to it being such an old language. However I do take some lessons from the way it was programmed. The fact that a language can be written using itself to compile itself is remarkable and really shows a great abstraction from the part of the author in a way that for 1960 was never seen before.

Here is why, this resembles a lot the idea of recursion, which for Lisp and languages like Clojure, which I will be touching on in minute, are the main way of “iterating” through some stuff in order to get to a result that cannot be immediately obtained from a math formula. And is truly amazing that this idea was implemented not only as one of the necessities of any programming language, but as a way to compile the language itself.

But there is something that I cannot overlook, now that I know Clojure and Lisp I understand the difference between the two and where Clojure got the inspiration from. And from the file itself I get the idea that lisp isn’t simply a programming language, but a family of languages called lisps. And the doubt that pops into my head is; What is the difference between the lisps?

Of course if I take the time to do some research I could get the answer but for me it would be pretty obvious that if someone like Richard Hickey (Clojure Creator) developed Clojure as a modern and more powerful lisp I don’t see the necessity for any of the other lisps that were referenced.