Julia: to Lisp or not to Lisp?

European Lisp Symposium · 23.6K views · 2016-05-30 · 1:04:53

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Overview

Stefan Karpinski's European Lisp Symposium 2016 talk asks whether Julia is a Lisp. He covers the features it borrows from Lisp, such as macros and closures, and where it departs, including syntax and its type system, with generated machine code shown.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as a brilliant talk on Julia's design and how it is or isn't a Lisp.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2016–2022

Topics

Programming language design Functional programming

What people said

e12e · 2016-06 · Strong recommendation
This reminded me of the recent brilliant talk about design of Julia: "Julia: to lisp or not to lisp?" [VIDEO]
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Flow · 2016-05 · Strong recommendation
Ah, the Julia talk ( [VIDEO] ) was just great. Showing the generated machine code is so hackerish yet so rare these days. :-/
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travisd · 2022-09 · Recommendation
Stefan Karpinski (one of the core Julia contributors) gave a talk (in 2016, so rather dated as far as the Julia syntax and whatnot go) about how Julia is secretly more lisp-y than even lisp & Scheme. The core of this argument is that most language specifications dedicate many pages to defining how arithmetic works, whereas Julia is actually just able to define that in Julia code as part of the stdlib (the implementation just calls out to LLVM intrinsics, but nonetheless, super neat!). `Int64` is actually defined in a Julia file. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by European Lisp Symposium, played through YouTube.

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