The roots of Lisp

For the article “The roots of Lisp” the title can give you great highlights about the writer’s topic, it’s about Lisp’s origins. Honestly, until today it was the most boring article that we read because I felt it extremely technical, but not giving any aggregated value for the class. I know that understanding the mathematical and logic behind Lisp is important, but not interesting at all and just some information and code, just like a user’s manual.

The first instances of the article explain the way that the seven primitive operations work, the arguments and the main usability for each operator, this part was a little reiterative considering that the knowledge we achieve to get during this semester is hardly focused on us to understand the functionality of Clojure, the evolution of Lisp. It’s remarkable that the explanations of the main concepts are that concise and precise, but the amount of knowledge that it’s pretended for us to understand in that little amount of space.

For the next part of the article is focused on the functions, and the way that the basic operators can be used for more complex operations. For this part it starts to get interesting, because we can see a more complex way of using more simple operations, but as it’s said, there is not a big difference between this and a C based language.

The interesting point comes when the author explains the evaluation function that makes the most interesting function. The evaluation of any function could be, not only useful, but also flexible at the time of getting computing problems solved. This is applied for our class in many ways, one of them being to make macros and define code to make more code. Even with this, I felt the article less powerful than the previous ones, and sharing something that we already know.