alt Hacker NewsI considered making the case for the parallels to Lisp, but it's not an easy case to make. Zig is profoundly not a Lisp. However, in my opinion it embodies a lot of the spirit of it. A singular syntax for programming and metaprogramming, built around an internally consistent mental model.
I don't really know how else to put it, but it's vaguely like a C derived spiritual cousin of Lisp with structs instead of lists.
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bsder • last Sunday at 11:59 PM
> I don't really know how else to put it, but it's vaguely like a C derived spiritual cousin of Lisp with structs instead of lists.
Zig comptime operates a lot like very old school Lisp FEXPRS before the Lisp intelligentsia booted them out because FEXPRS were theoretically messy and hard to compile.
I think because of the forces I talked about above we experience a repeating progression step in programming languages:
- we have a language with a particular philosophy of development
- we discover that some concept A is awkward to express in the language
- we add a special case to the language to make it nicer
- someone eventually invents a new base language that natively handles concept A nicely as part of its general model
Lisp in some sense skipped a couple of those progressions: it had a very regular language that didn't necessarily have a story for things that people at the time cared about (like static memory management, in the guise of latency). But it's still a paragon of consistency in a usable high-level language.
I agree that it's of course not correct to say that Zig is a descendent or modern equivalent of Lisp. It's more that the virtue that Lisp embodies over all else is a universal goal of language design, just one that has to be traded off against other things, and Zig has managed to do pretty well at it.