Programing Language: The Glory of Lisp's cons

By Xah Lee. Date:

Xah Lee wrote:

if we say that cons cell more than 2 elements are isomorphic to vectors (which is practically true without being picky), than we could also say cons cell of 2 elemests are just vectors of 2 elements (which i also believe). Thus, cons are not needed. (which is true in all modern langs, i think including clojure and newlisp, but am not sure there)

TheFlyingDutchman [zzbba…@aol.com] wrote:

Clojure does not have cons cells or any similar discrete node type. Surprisingly, it did name the function to prepend a element to data structures that implement the ISeq interface (referred to as a sequences) "cons".

this is what bugs me about “hacker” idiots. [see Computing Culture: What's Hacker?]

those who see the idiocy of cons, kept mum. Or at best, hint that it's just the way it was.

while, u have a gaggle of lisp fanatics forwardly defending the glory of cons.

it's a funny thing. U know, when cons doesn't exist in all modern langs, even new lisps (clojure, newLisp), it doesn't seem to mean anything to these old lisp idiots.

btw, does arc lisp do cons? also, i don't know about Qi Lisp. It would be interesting to know. (but no, am not really interested to take the trouble to find out. All i wanna do is call Common Lispers idiots.)

Common Lispers in general are idiots, of high order. (well, more precisely: the common lispers who hang in “comp.lang.lisp”. Actually, more precisely: just a handful of them vocal fanatics. Actually, the few that cry me troll seem to have decreased over the years. In fact if you look at this tread, it seems to be just a few who are having a crisis over cons, and only ONE actually directly attacking me per se. So am not sure why am i complaining. O, but the cons is a major issue to me. I think i really like to stamp out this cons myth. Stampede it out. So, i would like to encourage you all lispers… whenever someone brings cons up again, in some ignorant way, or excited way, give their ass a forceful kick. (in 5 years, if lisp are still alive, and cons use died off, u should thank one Xah Lee.))

here's what i like to see happen in comp.lang.lisp community. When someone ignorant or newb started to blurt out excitedly about cons (mostly due to massive old literature), you should dully tell them: Avoid it if you can. It's old. Not applicable today.

u know? cons is one of those identity thing about lisp, along with parens. That's why it's a hot button. It perennially crops up. It's like emacs's *scratch* buffer or its use of C-c and C-x. It's a identity crisis. Like, if u r the only one in town with blue hair, and it comes to pass that blue hair is bad, then you really can't accept it. It's like, hair color would become the only thing to judge a person.

faak common lispers.

 Xah

when a man doesn't know anything about computers, and he tells you YOUR software sucks, it probably is true. — Xah Lee

when a programer doesn't know anything about compilers, and he tells you YOUR language sucks, it probably is true. — Xah Lee

This is originally posted to comp.lang.lisp newsgroup. Source groups.google.com