Common Lisp vs Perl

Overview

Perl

Stacks4.3K

Followers935

Votes575

GitHub Stars2.2K

Forks602

Common Lisp

Stacks268

Followers255

Votes145

Common Lisp vs Perl: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Common Lisp and Perl

Perl and Common Lisp are two programming languages that have their own unique features and use cases. Here are six key differences between them:

1. Syntax: Common Lisp has a more traditional syntax with its focus on lists and parentheses, making it resemble a mathematical notation. On the other hand, Perl is known for its shorthand notation, using various special characters and symbols to accomplish tasks with concise code.

2. Paradigm: Common Lisp is primarily a functional programming language with support for imperative and object-oriented programming paradigms. Perl, on the other hand, is a highly flexible language that allows programmers to combine procedural, functional, and object-oriented styles as per their requirements.

3. Community and Libraries: Common Lisp has a smaller but dedicated community, with a focus on language standards and robust libraries for various purposes. Perl, on the other hand, has a larger user base and a wide range of libraries, making it suitable for a broad range of applications.

4. Expressiveness: Common Lisp provides a powerful macro system that allows users to extend the language with domain-specific abstractions, making it extremely expressive and customizable. In contrast, Perl is known for its built-in text manipulation capabilities and regular expression support, enabling rapid development for tasks involving parsing and data manipulation.

5. Language Stability: Common Lisp has a stable language specification and follows a more conservative approach to introducing new features. This stability can be advantageous for long-term projects with a need for compatibility. Perl, on the other hand, emphasizes flexibility and has a reputation for evolving quickly, introducing new features and improvements more frequently.

6. Use Cases: Common Lisp is often used for tasks that require complex programming logic, symbolic manipulation, artificial intelligence, and large-scale software development projects. Perl, on the other hand, has gained popularity for its ability to handle text processing, file manipulation, and system administration tasks in a concise and efficient manner.

In summary, the main differences between Common Lisp and Perl lie in their syntax, programming paradigms, community support, expressiveness, language stability, and use cases. These distinctions make them suitable for different types of projects and reflect the design philosophies of each language.

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Advice on Perl, Common Lisp

Rubin

Software Cloud Developer at RUBIN THOMAS

Oct 8, 2020

Review

As a developer myself, I would recommend you not to restrict yourself to JAVA, PHP or any other language. New Tools/languages keep coming every day. If you do plan to move to freelancing. PHP has a lot of options in the freelance space and a lot of competition too.

Learning PHP is as simple as learning any other language. It depends merely on your interest.

Personally if you can code, you should not restrict yourself. I have had to code in many languages, PHP, Perl, shell script, Python, Java, Javascript, Ruby etc... I would keep your developing skills and logic, algorithms etc.. and increase your knowledge and experience in the different languages.

I agree with you JAVA is a lot more time consuming. But it also has its enterprise level scope.

At the same time learning a new language should not be a barrier for you to stop exploring what's out there and keeping your skills up to date. Learning new technologies should be your primary focus and getting project out of your stack helps you build a good reputation.

There are many options for you to pursue. Having an open mindset will help you move forward. If you look to learn now, you are setting yourself up for a brighter future.

684k views684k

Comments

Ayush

May 17, 2022

Needs adviceon

Perl

Rust

AWS Lambda

I intend to use a programming language which I'll use as AWS runtime and write a script that will comb through tons of files in a directory and its subdirectories and search for simple text regular expressions and process and write the matches in a file as output. I have heard that Perl is good for regex based search but I also want the performance to be good as it will have to go through tons of files for IO. In this post: https://filia-aleks.medium.com/aws-lambda-battle-2021-performance-comparison-for-all-languages-c1b441005fd1, I see that Rust works well as AWS Lambda runtime with very good performance. Which one should I choose as my AWS lambda runtime for this problem? Golang is also an option as it is fast as per the above link.

170k views170k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Perl	Common Lisp
Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.	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]
Statistics
GitHub Stars 2.2K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 602	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 4.3K	Stacks 268
Followers 935	Followers 255
Votes 575	Votes 145
Pros & Cons
Pros 72 Lots of libraries 66 Open source 61 Text processing 54 Powerful 49 Unix-style Cons 4 Messy $/@/% syntax 3 No exception handling 2 "1;" 2 No OS threads 2 Bad OO support	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

What are some alternatives to Perl, Common Lisp?

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 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

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

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 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

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 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# (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 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 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.

Related Comparisons

Common Lisp vs Perl: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Common Lisp and Perl

Perl and Common Lisp are two programming languages that have their own unique features and use cases. Here are six key differences between them:

Common Lisp vs Perl

Overview

Common Lisp vs Perl: What are the differences?