"The Roots of Lisp" by Paul Graham
In the article called "The Roots of Lisp" by Paul Graham, the author describes the important role that John McCarthy played in 1960 with the creation of the programming language called Lisp. In its beginnings, Lisp was quite basic, but thanks to the potential of this language, it was possible to build much more complex and at the same time powerful functions. Lisp only needs lists because the key idea was to use a single data structure, both for code and for data, although in many of the current Lisp-based languages, they use more types of structures to simplify the language and make it more flexible.
On the other hand, I think that this Paul Graham's statement "It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model" is quite interesting and even successful. I think that both models mentioned by Graham are the core of modern programming languages. I would say that the C model has been the starting point of the languages of imperative programming and also it has been the starting point of functional programming. If that would have been truth, then it would only be necessary to add the model of object-oriented programming languages, since it is an important branch for modern programming languages.
I find it interesting that Lisp can be implemented with only seven primitive operators: "quote, atom, eq, car, cdr, cons, and cond". It is surprising that from these operators we can write any other function. We could say that Lisp is like the evolution of the Turing machine, a more complete and simple to use for the realization of computational algorithms. I also find it very interesting that with these operators it is possible to build something like an interpreter for Lisp, the eval function. That made me understand what they mean when they talk about Lisp can write to himself, and also the reason why it is said that Lisp is written basically with Lisp.
On the other hand, I think that this Paul Graham's statement "It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model" is quite interesting and even successful. I think that both models mentioned by Graham are the core of modern programming languages. I would say that the C model has been the starting point of the languages of imperative programming and also it has been the starting point of functional programming. If that would have been truth, then it would only be necessary to add the model of object-oriented programming languages, since it is an important branch for modern programming languages.
I find it interesting that Lisp can be implemented with only seven primitive operators: "quote, atom, eq, car, cdr, cons, and cond". It is surprising that from these operators we can write any other function. We could say that Lisp is like the evolution of the Turing machine, a more complete and simple to use for the realization of computational algorithms. I also find it very interesting that with these operators it is possible to build something like an interpreter for Lisp, the eval function. That made me understand what they mean when they talk about Lisp can write to himself, and also the reason why it is said that Lisp is written basically with Lisp.
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