alt Hacker NewsI often hear about lisp but never actually figured out what tooling you need Is it interpreted or compiled language? Why should I use it instead of any other languages?
I often hear about lisp but never actually figured out what tooling you need Is it interpreted or compiled language? Why should I use it instead of any other languages?
"Lisp" refers to several different languages in the same family, which contributes to the confusion.
Perhaps the default choice is Common Lisp which itself is specified in an ANSI standard and has several competing implementations. Some are compiled, some are interpreted.
Arguably the best is SBCL, which has a mature compiler and garbage collection. If you lean on implementation-specific features you can produce extremely fast code that approaches the performance of C in some benchmarks, but idiomatic and portable lisp is slower in practice.
>Why should I use it instead of any other languages?
The killer feature used to be the REPL. You can write the application function by function, and test the functions, data structures, or classes you write in the REPL as you're actively building the app.
Nowadays with LLMs writing all the code, I honestly don't see much reason to reach for lisp. Agents don't require a REPL, and other languages have vastly superior library support.