Re: How to get rid of *GNU Emacs* buffer on start-up?

[Xah <xahlee@gmail.com>]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> "Greater" than Lisp?  Assuming we're talking generically about Lisp, not
> just Emacs Lisp, please give me an example of a greter language.  (This
> isn't a rhetorical request; I'm genuinely interested.)

From my experince, the one language that is a ORDER OF MAGNITUDE
greater than lisp is Mathematica.

I haven't had a essay that is focused on “which language is better
than lisp”, but have written maybe 3, two thousand words essays on
issues very similar to this. If you read them, you can see why:

See:

Fundamental Problems of Lisp
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html

My First Encounter And Impression Of Lisp
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah_comp_exp.html

The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully Nested
Notations
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/notations.html

Each of the above article also links to several others, that either
support specific detail or to related issues. So, the totaly number of
essays on lisp as a language might be 15 or 20. e.g.

    * Lisp's List Problem
    * Is Lisp's Objects Concept Necessary? (thoughts on the model of
Lisp language)
    * The Importance of Terminology's Quality In A Computer Language
    * The Jargon “Lisp1” vs “Lisp2” (why should we avoid these
jargons)
    * What Is Closure In A Programing Language
    * The Term Currying In Computer Science
    * The Jargon “Tail Recursion”
    * Jargons And High Level Languages (unpolished essay)

... now, my opinion that Mathematica the lang being better than lisp
is based on me being actually the world's top expert on the language,
and a expert on emacs lisp. However, it is my opinion, Haskell, OCaml,
etc languages are easy candidates as better than lisp, albeit i do not
know these languages. On this note, see also this essay:

Proliferation of Computing Languages
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/new_langs.html

Just so you have a background context on my above opinions on
languages, besides being a world's top expert of Mathematica, i'm a
master at Perl and PHP, expert at Python, Java, Javascript, elisp. For
example, you can see my book length tutorials on these languages from
my website.


For your reading convenience, here's the plain text version of one of
the essay:
-------------------------

Xah Lee's Computing Experience Bio
(My First Encounter And Impression Of Lisp)

Xah Lee, 2008-01-28

[The following gives a brief outline of one aspect of my computing
experience. In particular, it outlines my first encounter and
impression of the lisp language. This was originally written as a
reply tangential to a thread in the online forum comp.lang.lisp]

Here's some personal story about how i ventured into lisp and my first
impression.

The path of my computing experience is kinda unusual like most other
things about me. In 1991, i was 23, and was attending a 2-year
community college in California. (DeAnza College and Foothill college)
(i have never had highschool (more or less never had a _chance_ to,
actually.))

During these college years (which is about 1991-1994, rather unusually
long for a 2-year community college), i've took all math courses they
offered (roughly equivalent to math classes of first 2 years in a 4
years university; culminating in multi-var calculus and a intro course
on Differential Equations and Linear Algebra, but no Abstract Algebra
nor Analysis proper), but i've never took any computer science
courses. (i think i might have taken a Pascal course)

It is also during the early 1990s, i started to learn programing on my
own. My first “language” is the one in HP-28s programable scientific
calculator. I remember having wrote a program to solve the 8-queens
problem all on my own. (without knowing or heard of the term back-
tracking) (see HP-28S Advanced Scientific Calculator )

And, during these years i bought Mathematica (because i heard it's the
best math tool and i love math and wanted to have the best tool). I
taught myself Mathematica and wrote some programs for visualizing
plane curves, which later got me hired at Wolfram Research in 1995 as
a intern. (see Visual Dictionary of Special Plane Curves)

By 1997, i'm one of the world's top Mathematica-programing expert. But
the curious thing is that, i have absolutely no idea what is a
compiler, parser, lexer, and absolutely have no faintest idea how
Operating System worked or its basic structure or purpose in technical
terms, and have absolutely no idea how networking worked. Do not even
have a practical concept of what's a computing protocol (such as TCP/
IP, HTTP/FTP, NFS ...etc.). Absolutely do not know anything about
“unix”, and vividly remember that i don't know what is “tar” and
“gzip” (just knew that these are in some exotic “unix workstations”
and some mysterious org or movement called “GNU”). (during all these
years up to 1997, i was using Mac, being what a Mac fan might call a
“power user” (as a computer user (as opposed to a programer); and
using the mouse; in the days when Macs are just Finder and Multi-
Finder, and used by Desktop publishing, with MacUser and MacWorld
magazines publishing tricks and software application reviews etc.
(e.g. Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Nesus Writer,
Spreadsheets...etc)))

I must stress, i have absolutely no concrete idea about anything that
a normal computer science student would know in his first or second
year. I do not have any concrete idea what IS a language specification
(such as Java lang spec or Common Lisp “Hyperspec” or Emacs Lisp
Reference Manual, etc) I have close to absolutely no knowledge to how
ANY other computing languages. Put in another way, i wouldn't know how
to write a Hello Word in any other language. I do not know, what
exactly is compiling and linking, just knew they are something “real”
programing languages have to do before a program can run. I have no
notion of what's a “white paper”, “functional programing”, and DO NOT
understand (or even heard of) the meaning of “side effect” (in the
context of functional programing). (i vividly recall, the first time i
heard the term “side effect”, is in 1995 when i was trying to
describe, in some verbose manner, a nature of the code i wrote, to
Methamtica creator Stephen Wolfram (in the sense a student is trying
to present his idea), and he said “[you mean] side effect ...”, and i
was like “Yeah, exactly, ‘side effect’!” (and feeling enlightened how
the phrase described the situation well).)

The gist of this is that, from my programing experience from 1991 to
about 1997, i learned programing only in HP-28s and Mathematica, by
mostly the shear reading of their manuals from cover to cover
(practically several times), while having just about no concept of any
basic computer science ideas. (However, I am familiar of many
computing related mathematical concepts, such as algorithm, algorithm
efficiency order (typically expressed as “computation complexity” or
“O(n)”), because i love math and have studied some discrete/finite
math on my own. (But, for example, i do not at the time know
Algorithms that are typically taught to CS students, such as sorting
algorithms. I have tried to read Knuth's Art Of Programing but it was
pretty incomprehensible (To understand Knuth's books, one has to be
familiar with assembly languages, since he uses MMX, which is a
artificial assembly language).))

From about 1997 onwards, i started to study most of these things,
starting with unix and perl, by sheer reading of the manuals and
documentations and industrial books (e.g. O'Reilly) and hands on
coding in them. (by 2000, i'm a fair expert of unix admin and perl,
with knowledges in SQL/database, working knowledge of IP protocols...
etc, actually working in start-ups in Silicon Valley's tech boom since
late 1998, to write web-based applications (e-store).)

Ok, the main point i started to write this personal history, is my
first encounter with Lisp. (the previous paragraphs are just intro.)

Although lacking a formal or conventional education, i'm by birth
highly intelligent and by nature very curious. This means i have read
a lot of books or texts or literatures i have in contact with and in
library (was a avid library visitor), such as the massive number of
programing FAQs and FAQs of other subjects (such as BDSM) etc. (FAQs
were widely popular in the 1990s, somewhat analogous to today's
Wikipedia) So, it is very present in my awareness, that there is a
language called Lisp, associated with the phrase Artificial
Intelligence (the very phrase, at face value, excites me greatly), and
is supposed to be extremely powerful and beautiful. And, at the time,
i have heard, that Scheme, is the most beautiful and elegant language
that exists. (this is my reading impression, anyway) And, i heard that
the book “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” by
Harold Abelson et al, is the best computer science book. So, i started
to read it and learn Scheme.

Remember, at the time i'm a master of Mathematica _the language_
itself, yet do not know much about the typical concepts and knowledge
taught to college students as “computer science”. When i started to
learn Scheme, the first thing that hit me is the cons business. To me,
who are accustomed to Mathematica, finding the cons business weird and
unwieldy. It puzzled me. I was thinking, how can a elegant language
have this? Certainly in Mathematica i can create, extract, manipulate
nested lists (tree structure) far more easily. At the time, since i
barely have basic knowledge of any computer science subjects, i was
greatly puzzled about the situation. (in fact made a newsgroup post in
comp.lang.scheme, tentatively trying to find the answer (and was
flamed by one Erik Naggum) (this is 1998 or 1999, i think))

Of course, today, with various levels of expertise in several
languages ( Mathematica, Emacs Lisp, unix shell, perl, php, python,
javascript, sql, java, Linden Scripting Lang (Second Life virtual
world), inert langs (HTML/CSS, LaTeX, POV-Ray ...)) and have read
countless tech papers and worked in complex software, data centers,
and wallowed in all kinds of industrial spaghetti code with non-
existent documentations, i know for a certainly, that Mathematica,
which perchance to be my first language, is in fact the world's _most_
advanced and high-level language, bar none.

(this short personal account is not supposed to be a pitch for
Mathematica. It just came out that way. There are, of course other
langs, depending on context and area of application, are equal quality
as Mathematica. For example, i would think Haskell, erlang, OCaml,
dylan etc would qualify, but i just have not actually learned these)

(gee, i just typed as quickly as possible and it came out to be over 1
thousand words of a brief personal bio of my computing experiences.
Good for me! The original intention was just to describe my first
impression of Scheme)
A Mathematica Programer's View of Lisp

The Mathematica language↗ is very similar to lisp. In fact, one could
say it's a lisp too. It shares the essential quality of lisp, namely:
uniformly nested syntax, programs are largely based on manipulating
lists, entities are symbolic, program is data and data is program.
From a Mathematica expert's point of view (me), the first thing that
seems odd of lisp is the low-level-ness. Perhaps in order of the low
level impression:

1. The cons business. (lists are made up of cons cells and it is
necessary for the programer to understand this to write any non-
trivial lisp program) (Elisp Manual: Cons-Cells)

2. No universal high level treatment of lists. (In Mathematica, there
are a system of functions to extract or manipulate (nested) lists
considered as trees. e.g. getting all elements at a level, or
arbitrary set of nodes of a tree. All these based on a tree index
concept. (i.e. first branch's second branch's third's branch will be
1,2,3. See Mathematica reference: Elements Of Lists↗. Such coherent
manipulation of generic list is sometimes called Array programming
languages↗ that began with APL↗.) In lisp, programers uses cons, car,
cdr, caadr, etc. That is bizarre and downright stupid.) (lisps do have
higher lever list manipulation functions to various degree and
consistency, such as “nth” and few others. But in general, due to the
fact that lists are made of cons cells, and consequently necessates
the concept of “proper list” and “improper list”, and also the
frequent use of car, cdr, etc, its not possible to use high-level list
functions without knowing the structure of the list.)

3. The syntax is a bit quirky. In particular, a Mathematica programer
sees that sometimes list is written as “(list a b c)”, but sometimes
there's this oddity “'(a b c)” (which is syntactically equivalent to
“(quote (a b c))”). And, when mapping a function, sometimes the
programer also needs to put the apostrophe in front. (A Mathematica
programer would think, if a function (e.g. “map”) that takes another
function as argument, why would the function require the programer to
put the apostrophe, whereas the function itself could be designed to
not evaluate that argument.)

4. A behind-the-scenes model of computation. Namely, lisp the language
deals with the concept of “lisp objects”, and there's a “print syntax”
that represent these objects. (and a “read syntax” that reads a code
into these objects) (see Elisp Manual: Printed-Representation.)

I think these are probably most odd things in lisp for a Mathematica
programer on the first exposure.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄