Which is the best implementation of LISP family of languages for real
world programming ?
http://wiki.alu.org/Implementation
Kindly pick one from commercial and one from open-source .
The criteria is :
libraries, gui interface and builder, libraries for TCP, and evolving
needs.
Please compare LISP and its virtues with other languages such as
javascript, python etc.
I put javascript in the context that it is very similar in its
architecture (homoiconic ie same representation for data-structures
and operations, ie hierarchical, which means nested-lists<=> n-ary
tree<=> binary tree<=> linked-list<=> dictionary<=> task-subtask,
and implicitly based on what C calls pointers, and at machine level
the indirect addressing of memory) to lisp family.
I put python in the context that it has the most extensive libraries
and shares the build-fix virtue of lisp highlighted by Paul Graham in
his books. Python is touted for its rapid prototyping of guis. It
syntax enforces stable format which guards against programmer malice
or sloppiness - so that there is a certain level of legacy code
readability.
Both have eval but not clear what is the implementation efficiency to
justify the habit of excessively using it.
Certainly, lisp/scheme are excellent for learning the concepts of
programming languages due to its multi-paradigm nature and readily
available code of the elementary interpreter.
Is there an IDE for these lispish-scheming languages ? Is there
quality implementation for Eclipse ? Emacs pre-supposes some knowledge
of these so that newbie can get stuck. Also, emacs help is not very
good.
Is there a project whereby the internal help of emacs (analogous to
its man pages) are being continuously being updated AND shared ? I
have never seen updates to the help. Perhaps, the commercial people
are doing it, even from the posts of the newsgroups, but the public
distros or these newsgroups have NEVER made such an announcement.
Explanations integrated into the help are more important than the
books - its like the wikipedia incorporated into emacs.
Is there support for the color highlighting of the code by hovering as
on this page ?
http://community.schemewiki.org/?lexical-scope
Which book/paper has the briefest minimal example of gui design along
XML nested/hiearchical elements with event-listeners for lisp/scheme ?
Thanks