Two reasons that I think Lisp is interesting (2022 version)

(Posted on 2022-03-22)

  1. Lisp taught me to create functions that transform data step by step instead of adding mutable variables into loops. An immutable data structure is important for transforming data step by step without messing up existing data. Lisp's default data structure is a singly linked list.

  2. Lisp macro is easy to write compared to competitors. Rust's macro is powerful. Rust's macro is about transforming a TokenStream, and #Lisp's macro is about transforming a list. However, I prefer transforming a list to a TokenStream since I don't have to learn new structures and new commands for manipulating a new structure.