Marc Abramowitz » Dylan is to Lisp as Ruby is to Smalltalk

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4/5/2006

Dylan is to Lisp as Ruby is to Smalltalk

April 05th 2006 Posted to General

Chris astutely observed that Ruby is Smalltalk for people who have to have files.

Well I think that Dylan is Lisp for people who hate parentheses.

Or if you prefer analogies: Dylan is to Lisp as Ruby is to Smalltalk. Both try to largely capture the features of a predecessor but eliminate a barrier to entry.

Dylan has a lot of the stuff that made Lisp cool, like dynamicism, multiple dispatch, generic methods, and super cool macros that can do everything but fry an egg. But Dylan eschews S-expressions in favor of a more Algol-like syntax with infix expressions.

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