[I was David B.]

I have found a couple of places where lisp is advertised as a language that allows rapid application developement and I became curious to have a look into it.

Does anyone use lisp on his/her mac and can give a comment how it works compared to java or python?
Is it possible to develop apps that fulfill todays requirements (with guis, event handling, network access and decent performance)?

[Millennium]

I haven't used Lisp on a Mac before, nor have I actually used Lisp at all in a long time. To be honest, I found the language interesting but overrated by its fans, who tend to believe that every new feature touted by a programming language was already doable in Lisp -and usually implemented much more elegantly- for decades. It is very good in some areas, but relatively poor in others. The learning curve is somewhat steep; the language itself is easy, but taking advantage of it requires a very different way of thinking from what people used to programming in C-derived languages (including Java and Python) are used to.

Certainly it is possible to develop apps that fulfill today's requirements using Lisp, if the Lisp you're using has proper access to the various OS facilities. Some of the Lisp implementations on OSX do this, while others don't. OpenMCL looks promising, but as I understand things it's not quite ready for prime time yet; its Carbon bindings and Cocoa bridge are good but the binaries have trouble running across multiple versions of OSX.

That said, if you decide to try it out, a bit of advice: mentioning XML to a Lisp fan is usually not a wise idea. Among Lisp fans, XML in general seems to be one of the biggest examples of the "we've been doing it, and doing it better, for decades" mentality. You will get drawn into a long dialogue about how S-expressions (a concept which is involved in most of Lisp's syntax) are allegedly infinitely better than XML syntax.

[Chuckit]

Lisp is one of those languages that inspires people to fanaticism, making claims like "My language will allow you to write a complete CAD program in two and a half lines of code! And it will be beautiful, ingenious code, oh yes, because [name of language here] makes it so!" The other two I can think of off the top of my head are Smalltalk and (perhaps mainly by association with Smalltalk) Ruby.

[GeeYouEye]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Lisp is one of those languages that inspires people to fanaticism, making claims like "My language will allow you to write a complete CAD program in two and a half lines of code! And it will be beautiful, ingenious code, oh yes, because [name of language here] makes it so!" The other two I can think of off the top of my head are Smalltalk and (perhaps mainly by association with Smalltalk) Ruby.

My language lets me write a web browser in 0 lines of code.

[leperkuhn]

I used Scheme a few years ago, and I absolutely hate it. I found assembly to be more productive.

[parallax]

I think the most sound advice is this: learn them all, and decide from task to task which one to use.

I really enjoy programming in LISP. I wouldn't use it for everything but there have been many times when I've booted up a scheme shell to solve some problem. And I wouldn't say it's been a non-influence on my other programming.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Lisp is one of those languages that inspires people to fanaticism, making claims like "My language will allow you to write a complete CAD program in two and a half lines of code! And it will be beautiful, ingenious code, oh yes, because [name of language here] makes it so!" The other two I can think of off the top of my head are Smalltalk and (perhaps mainly by association with Smalltalk) Ruby.

Python gets some of that, though they'll be a little more realistic about it and only claim to do it in ten lines of code

[I was David B.]

Thank you for your comments.
I hope its not true that assembly is more productive than Lisp

I will have a look soon and report my experiences here.

[raduga]

Lisp is neat, but strange. I took a couple college courses on it recently. I'd say, if you're willing to invest yourself completely in Lisp for a few weeks or months, and try to forget everything you know about C and other procedural languages, you might just be able to "get it". If you don't manage to get "it" about Lisp, it won't be terribly useful or productive. But if you can grok Lisp, it's an amazingly refreshing way to think about writing code.

http://www.paulgraham.com has written some insightful and sometimes motivating essays on Lisp.