lisp — news, coverage & facts — IJR

lisp — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Notable quotes

“Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.”
— Paul Graham (2001) "Arc: An Unfinished Dialect of Lisp." paulgraham.com, November 2001.
“Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.”
— Alan Perlis, as quoted in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman.
“The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.”
— Richard Stallman, [How I do my computing]
“In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)”
— Slide 9 in presentation to Lisp Users Group.
“Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form.”
— Robert Floyd, "The Paradigms of Programming", 1978 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 22 (8), August 1979: pp. 455–460.
“Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.”
— Larry Wall, "Wherefore Art, Thou?", The Perl Journal 1(1); reprinted in Linux Journal, March 1, 1997.

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Overview

A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants. These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping is produced when the tip of the tongue protrudes between the front teeth and dentalized lisping is produced when the tip of the tongue just touches the front teeth. The transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet for interdental sibilants is and and for simple dental sibilants is and . When a fronted lisp does not have a sibilant quality, due to placing the lack of a grooved articulation, the IPA transcription would be or variants thereof. A occurs when the and sounds are produced with air-flow over the sides of the tongue. It is also called "slushy ess" or a "slushy lisp" in part due to its wet, spitty sound. The symbols for these lateralised sounds in the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for disordered speech are and . A occurs when part or the entire air stream is directed through the nasal cavity. The transcription for sibilants with nasal frication in the extensions to the IPA is and ; simple nasal fricatives are and . A strident lisp results in a high-frequency whistle or hissing sound caused by stream passing between the tongue and the hard surface. In the extensions to the IPA, whistled sibilants are transcribed and . A palatal lisp is where the speaker attempts to make a sibilant while the middle of the tongue is in contact with the soft palate, or with a posterior articulation of the sibilant. The latter may be transcribed and , and , or the like. Causes Successful treatments have shown that causes are functional rather than physical: that is, most lisps are caused by errors in tongue placement or density of the tongue within the mouth rather than caused by any injury or congenital or acquired deformity to the mouth. The most frequently discussed of these problems is tongue thrust in which the tongue protrudes beyond the front teeth. This protrusion affects speech as well as swallowing and can lead to lisping. Ankyloglossia or tongue tie can also be responsible for lisps in children — however, it is unclear whether these deficiencies are caused by the tongue tie itself or the muscle weakness following the correction of the tongue tie. Overbites and underbites may also contribute to non lingual lisping.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).