When a young programmer who has been using C for several years is convinced that C is the best possible programming language and that people who don't prefer it just haven't use it enough, what is the best argument for Lisp vs C, given that they're already convinced in favor of C?

• Petalisp

  17 423 8.5 Common Lisp

  Elegant High Performance Computing

One trick is that Common Lisp can generate and compile code at runtime, whereas static languages typically do not have a compiler available at runtime. This lets you make your own lazy person's JIT/staged compiler, which is useful if some part of the problem is not known at compile-time. Such an approach has been used at least for array munging, type munging and regular expression munging.

• one-more-re-nightmare

  11 133 4.2 Common Lisp

  A fast regular expression compiler in Common Lisp

  

One trick is that Common Lisp can generate and compile code at runtime, whereas static languages typically do not have a compiler available at runtime. This lets you make your own lazy person's JIT/staged compiler, which is useful if some part of the problem is not known at compile-time. Such an approach has been used at least for array munging, type munging and regular expression munging.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• SICL

  26 1,051 9.9 TeX

  A fresh implementation of Common Lisp

Both work. I basically never have to touch C or even FFI (cl+ssl being the main use of FFI for me), unless I am poking at SBCL guts in my spare time, and that isn't necessary either. I am sure many Haskell hackers are happy with their IO monad too.

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