Snob or not, what increasingly pulls me to languages are the highly productive DSLs that seem to fall out of them. For example, I need to deliver a few lightweight web apps/services - and I stumble across Sinatra on Ruby (with a little Sequel thrown in mixed with the oci8 oracle gem), which seems to do all I need. My little ruby code snippets look just like that - snippets that are short and expressive of the what I'm trying to do.
Lisp seems to be the "godfather" of these things and I'm more and more interested in what makes me productive, without being surrounded by a team of enterprise programmers and all the boilerplate that seems to fall out of other languages.
I make my living hacking SQL. What I'm really looking for there is the ability to create a lambda on the fly for custom grouping (eg implementing a business rule dynamically). I've worked on at least three big enterprise projects where I could have eliminated thousands, if not tens of thousands of LOC with a feature like that. Maybe I should punt and roll with a Prolog engine in the Lisp of choice. Who knows.
I really enjoy the articles and comments on these topics here on HN. Keep 'em coming.
Lisp seems to be the "godfather" of these things and I'm more and more interested in what makes me productive, without being surrounded by a team of enterprise programmers and all the boilerplate that seems to fall out of other languages.
I make my living hacking SQL. What I'm really looking for there is the ability to create a lambda on the fly for custom grouping (eg implementing a business rule dynamically). I've worked on at least three big enterprise projects where I could have eliminated thousands, if not tens of thousands of LOC with a feature like that. Maybe I should punt and roll with a Prolog engine in the Lisp of choice. Who knows.
I really enjoy the articles and comments on these topics here on HN. Keep 'em coming.