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  5. Common Lisp vs JetBrains MPS

Common Lisp vs JetBrains MPS

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks270
Followers255
Votes145
JetBrains MPS
JetBrains MPS
Stacks7
Followers15
Votes4
GitHub Stars1.6K
Forks307

Common Lisp vs JetBrains MPS: What are the differences?

<Common Lisp (CL) and JetBrains Meta Programming System (MPS) are two different languages that have distinct features and purposes. Common Lisp is a general-purpose programming language, while JetBrains MPS is a language workbench. Below are the key differences between Common Lisp and JetBrains MPS.>

  1. Paradigm: Common Lisp is a multi-paradigm language that supports imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming styles. On the other hand, JetBrains MPS is specifically designed for language-oriented programming, where the focus is on creating domain-specific languages (DSLs) and language extensions.

  2. Syntax: Common Lisp has a rich and expressive syntax with extensive support for macros and symbolic expressions, commonly known as S-expressions. In contrast, JetBrains MPS uses a projectional editing approach, where the syntax is defined using language concepts and rules, allowing users to manipulate their domain-specific languages visually.

  3. Extensibility: In Common Lisp, programmers can easily extend the language by defining new functions, macros, and data types, making it highly customizable. In JetBrains MPS, the extensibility is achieved through language definition and metaprogramming techniques, allowing users to create and modify their languages without altering the underlying infrastructure.

  4. Tooling: Common Lisp has a mature ecosystem of tools, libraries, and development environments that support various development workflows and methodologies. JetBrains MPS provides a specialized development environment for creating and working with domain-specific languages, offering specific features for language design, composition, and analysis.

  5. Community: Common Lisp has a dedicated and active community of developers, enthusiasts, and academics who contribute to the language's growth, maintenance, and promotion. JetBrains MPS, being a more specialized tool, has a smaller but focused user base that primarily consists of language engineers, researchers, and industry professionals working on language-oriented programming projects.

  6. Purpose: The primary goal of Common Lisp is to provide a powerful and flexible language for general-purpose programming, covering a wide range of application domains. Conversely, JetBrains MPS focuses on language engineering and domain-specific language design, enabling users to build custom languages and solutions tailored to their specific needs.

In Summary, Common Lisp and JetBrains MPS differ in paradigm, syntax, extensibility, tooling, community support, and primary purpose, catering to distinct programming and language design requirements.

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Detailed Comparison

Common Lisp
Common Lisp
JetBrains MPS
JetBrains MPS

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

It is a tool to design domain-specific languages. It uses projectional editing which allows users to overcome the limits of language parsers, and build DSL editors, such as ones with tables and diagrams. It implements language-oriented programming.

-
Domain-specific Language; Projectional Editor; Editor Support
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
307
Stacks
270
Stacks
7
Followers
255
Followers
15
Votes
145
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community
Pros
  • 1
    You can build your own programming language with IDE
  • 1
    Translates custom language into Java or others
  • 1
    An amazing tool to write DSLs
  • 1
    Inherits language grammars due to no-parser model
  • 0
    An amazing tool to write DSLs and translate them into g
Cons
  • 1
    The base version provides only Java and plain text out
  • 1
    Unpopular so has a very small geek-like community
  • 1
    Does not provide graphical modeling languages input
  • 1
    Requires very accurate selling to customers
  • 1
    Steep entry curve (compiler writing skills)

What are some alternatives to Common Lisp, JetBrains MPS?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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