This article is about the most important
aspects of programming languages and specifically of LISP, LISP was created by
John McCarthy, and what is awesome about it, it's that it was not designed to
be a programming language, McCarthy did it as a theoretical exercise, he showed
how given a handful of simple operators and a notation for function you can
build a whole program, he called LISP because it used lists as its basis, it
stands as List Processing. But McCarthy was not the person who developed the
language to work in a computer, it was Steve Russell.
LISP is the basis of many programming
languages we know at this moment, for instance they implement many of the
fundamentals of LISP, for example:
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Conditionals: Most of the language
have this feature included nowadays
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A function type: IN lisp,
functions are a data type just like integers or strings, they have a literal
representation can be stored in variables can be passed as arguments.
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Recursion, LISP was the first to
support it.
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All variables are effectively
pointers, values are what have types, not variables
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Garbage Collection
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Programs composed of expressions.
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A symbol type.
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A notation for code using trees of
symbols and constants.
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The whole language there all the
time, there is no distinction between read-time, compile-time and runtime.
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As you can see, not only LISP has this fundamentals, many languages have
this fundamentals and the most important part of the article is to basically
know that each programming Language focuses on specific tasks, web development
is to javascript, data Structure java or c, and it is important for us as
engineers to know which Language to use for each task to make our lives easier
and our work the best.
