The revenge of the nerds

Again we have read a conference transcript that talks about the power of lisp over all other languages, this time using more concrete examples (even if they where using super old versions of all the languages present) which I liked, because it gave me some sense of what they are all talking about (the people that say Lisp is the most powerful language ever). About this article what I found to be the most interesting is that in one of the examples he gave about Python he said that in some time you could probably expect to write a piece of code that returns a function in a way that is really close to the latest implementation, about 15 years later. That actually surprised me a lot, that someone could predict that kind of thing is really unexpected, it made me believe much more in the things he was saying, that all languages where asymptotically reaching the limit presented by Lisp. I wish that by the end of this semester I can finally understand what all the fuss is about and why it matters that much; especially because I've been using languages that are practically interchangeable, especially now that most of them have caught up to having almost the same functionality, with an énfasis in almost, (most of the code I do in python I wouldn't like to write in C++ and viceversa) they are all specialized in some different concept to make their users be more productive and less frustrated I think. To be honest, the feature that is macros doesn't seem that far from what JS and Python can do with functions being "first class citizens " as they call it, and even C++ has a function type that you can pass around in parameters,a although I have never tried to do anything else with them, like returning them from functions or just storing them in variables so I'm not sure if it is possible or not.

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