Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP

Eric Kidd — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 11:30:00 -0500

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.

Why Hygienic Macros Rock

Eric — Fri, 13 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0400

I've recently been reading a lot of excellent essays on programming language design by Paul Graham. Paul and I agree about a number of things: (1) LISP is beautiful and powerful family of languages, even by modern standards, (2) all existing dialects of LISP are lacking a certain something, and (3) programmatic macros are a Good Idea.

Random Hacks: Tag LISP

Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP

Why Hygienic Macros Rock