My ears perked up at the dual statement that although you can write a Lisp program that writes Lisp programs, nobody does it (um, macros?); and that you can't write a C program that writes a C programs (okay, maybe nobody does this, but you certainly can). I guess he means that C is not "aware" of its own constructs the way that Lisp is.
Also, he said that the algebraic languages were "dying out", but that because of this self-generating ability (which nobody uses), that the future of Lisp was "open".
Comments
I suspect "possible" here is not used in the absolute sense, but more just "it would be a total pain in the ass in C, whereas Lisp excels at it".
After all, anything is "possible" with hand-written assembly code, too, but realistically speaking, it's not practical.
I couldn't post this last night, but yeah:
My ears perked up at the dual statement that although you can write a Lisp program that writes Lisp programs, nobody does it (um, macros?); and that you can't write a C program that writes a C programs (okay, maybe nobody does this, but you certainly can). I guess he means that C is not "aware" of its own constructs the way that Lisp is.
Also, he said that the algebraic languages were "dying out", but that because of this self-generating ability (which nobody uses), that the future of Lisp was "open".
Huh?
I understood the "open" comment to mean "open to modification and extension", independent of whether it is dying out.