Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP
Posted by Eric Kidd Sat, 03 Dec 2005 16:30:00 GMT
Years ago, I looked at Ruby and decided to ignore it. Ruby wasn’t as popular as Python, and it wasn’t as powerful as LISP. So why should I bother?
Of course, we could turn those criteria around. What if Ruby were more popular than LISP, and more powerful than Python? Would that be enough to make Ruby interesting?
Before answering this question, we should decide what makes LISP so powerful. Paul Graham has written eloquently about LISP’s virtues. But, for the sake of argument, I’d like to boil them down to two things:
- LISP is a dense functional language.
- LISP has programmatic macros.
As it turns out, Ruby compares well as a functional language, and it fakes macros better than I’d thought.
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