Is Lisp the most powerful programming language?

It's fun to use yes, Scheme in particular, but I've yet to find one practical use for it.

Before someone mentions Paul Graham, I don't have the time or money to leave a Fortune 500 company with a buggy, unstable, completely unmaintanable codebase as a troll.

That's just being pedantic. Yes, you can rewrite Amazon's backend systems in FORTRAN, but that would be fucking retarded.

But your question is exceedingly vague. The "most powerful language" doesn't mean anything to me beside Turing completeness. Did you mean something like "the best language to develop in" or "the most effective in a business setting" or "the most lexographically compact" or "the most feature-filled"? For (1) it's subjective, but I am partial to functional styles. For (2), probably Java. For (3), I think Ruby is pretty lexographically compact. For (4), JavaScript supports imperative, functional, and OOP paradigms, and its prototype system is more flexible than traditional inheritance models. I hope this answered your question OP.

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It wasn't my question. That was my second post in this thread (the other one being the redirect to /g/).

"Power" in a programming language is a pretty common term, although I'll agree the actual definition is pretty vague. I've always interpreted it as "allows the most abstraction while still allowing low-level access." That puts languages like C++ and Ada up at the top.

Basically, I define "power" like Larry Wall: easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. The easier the easy things are and the more possible the hard things are, the more powerful the language.

LISP doesn't fare bad in that arena.

Kek.

Do a search for "BCHS." Web development in C. I dunno if it was originally supposed to be a joke, but it's a real thing.

What about FORTRAN mastertalk?
inb4: I am an R monkey

Enjoy your stack overflows.

So what? C isn't that complicated.

From Assembly to C there's a 10 orders of magnitude change

From C to Pyhton there are some changes but they are mostly the same still

If by powerful you mean easiest, then no. You don't have the sheer amount of libraries that you do with something like C++.

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>> he hasn't tried python
>It's like programming pure butter.
An elegant description of such an inelegant language.
^this

Wut

I kek'd

I'll bite:

How is python not an elegant language?

This, or just Haskell.

There are more powerful languages with no existing implementation. There probably won't ever be implementations of them unless we do some magic shit. They are languages that can describe computation that a Turing Machine cannot. One simple one (or rather an infinite set of them) is described here esolangs.org/wiki/Banana_Scheme

is scala bad? i just signed up for this coursera.org/learn/progfun1

I've done a small bit of Scala programming.

No, it's not bad. It's basically Java without the stick up its ass.

Isn't it still just another shit tier interpreted language that runs on the JVM, like Java?

Scala is for people who would like to program in Haskell but their boss won't let them.

>is the most powerful ?
no.

Grow up, kid.

Few other languages provide homoiconicity, and that isn't something you can add as a library.

If you don't need that, then a different language will probably get the job done more quickly/efficiently/robustly.

Writing in Lisp avoids the risk of "oh fuck, we need to re-write this in Lisp", but for 99% of projects that's a fairly remote risk.

>What is TCO

WE CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE COMPUTER WITH OUR SPELLS WE CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE COMPUTER WITH OUR SPELLS WE CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE COMPUTER WITH OUR SPELLS WE CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE COMPUTER WITH OUR SPELLS WE CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE COMPUTER WITH OUR SPELLS WE CONJURE THE SPIRITS OF THE COMPUTER WITH OUR SPELLS

youtube.com/watch?v=aHk42kDwesM

All languages are equally powerfull

p/a/tchy is shit so just go to not cuz ur a pedo tho lol

>what is non-tail recursion

> All languages are equally powerfull
For a rather pedantic and useless-in-practice definition of "powerful".

If the only useful measure of a language was Turing completeness, there wouldn't be any need for interpreters or compilers or even assemblers. We could just enter raw object code.

It's computational power is equivalent to any other Turing complete programming language.

why are people still posting itt?

A really inefficient way of doing things if you can do tail recursion?

'sides, if you're on a lisp without tail recursion (elisp, some CL implementations), just use iteration.

Because people are morons and think there's always some one-size-fits-all solution that's better than everything else out there.

Still, if there was, it'd probably be similar to C++.

Python is interpreted.

Yes. And?

The topic of the thread is the best programming language. I was answering within this context.

OK, so being interpreted is a point in python's favor because it's easily embeddable, offers a REPL, and is usable as a scripting language? Or it's a point against it because it's not capable of the raw speed of FORTRAN/C/C++/Pascal?

Don't get me wrong, the idea of the "best" or "most powerful" programming language is fucking retarded, but just saying the Python is interpreted doesn't really tell us much.

This desu senpai. Anything without dependent strong typing isn't even in the running.

>The topic of the thread is the best programming language
No it absolutely is not. The topic is the most powerful language which is a pretty pointless thing to talk about when pretty much everything with an implementation (with a few exceptions) is equivalent in power to a Turing Machine (given enough resources) and the only languages which are more powerful lack an implementation.

Haskell masterrace reporting in

Python is autistic, script in Lua.

>Ruby is pretty lexographically compact
Ruby ain't got no shit on Perl.

>The topic is the most powerful language which is a pretty pointless thing to talk about

Yep. It's a ridiculous topic mostly brought up by fucking kids who think that their favorite language is better for everything.

>Turing Machine

You people crying "Turing machine" all over the place don't fucking get it. Having the same possibilities does not equal having the same power.

Here's the definition of power I see most often: does a language provide the tools and abstractions to allow me to accomplish to my exact specifications with the least amount of effort? If so, it's powerful.

C is powerful for writing device drivers. It gives you the abstractions you need and the type flexibility that bit twiddling requires. PHP is powerful for writing small-to-medium backend web applications. Java is... well, no, Java sucks. It's the modern COBOL. Perl is powerful for sysadmin scripting and text manipulation. FORTRAN is powerful for raw number crunching. C++ is powerful for GUI applications, as long as you have the right toolkits. And Python is powerful for prototyping, numerical analysis, and all-around scripting.

LISP is powerful for some of these tasks. I wouldn't write device drivers in it.

Oh, good, you're here. Yay.

Lua is to BASIC what Javascript is to Java.

So edgy
Get your paedophile anger back to >>>/a

The other troll at least knows how to

I realize it's nitpicky but the definition of power I usually come across is just how much something is able do. I'd much rather use other words for this use case like "flexibility", "terseness", "readability", "usefulness", "capability", "speed", or really anything else.

(I admit, I am reaching pretty far on this mostly because I really just want to find people who will talk about uncomputable languages with me)

See, I'm a woodworker by hobby. I mostly use hand tools.

I can take a board rough cut from the tree, joint it (make a flat face and reference edge 90 degrees to the face), rip it to size, plane it down to proper thickness, and square all four sides with nothing more than a rip saw, a #5 plane, a #7 plane, a square, and a marking guage.

Or I could do it with a table saw, jointer, and planer.

One of these methods takes at least two orders of magnitude longer than the other.

That's power.

(I do it the old way because I don't have the room or money for a jointer and I'm a galoot that likes my hand tools, but I won't pretend they're more powerful. More flexible, certainly, but not more powerful.)

I've had my share with Common Lisp. Really gentle syntax and language overall; you can interpret it and also compile it. Bignums are awesome. Quicklisp helps a lot. Current WM is Stumpwm and it's fast and cool. Overall, a good language, but lacks community. For math stuff and scientific stuff it is better than Python but it's harder to learn.

Also, I'd love to talk about uncomputable languages with you, but I don't know anything about them. Sorry.

I looked into CL and started on what's his name's book, but then ended up learning elisp and Scheme instead.

Whenever I need to do something weird with numbers, I jump into Guile (Scheme). It gives me better answers than FORTRAN when I deal with complex numbers (admittedly, that says more about me than FORTRAN, probably).

Brainfuck