this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Programming
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I feel the same! also there is
evalin javascript or any other scripting language. why use Lisp specifically?I self-learned lisp last year using the old SICP book, but I do consider myself a fairly expert programmer, and I felt that book was a bit hard at the end of it.
IMHO the key difference of lisp's eval wrt python's eval is that it takes in input a parsed expression (a lisp list) and not a string. In lisp though you don't have to use eval much, because the macros allow you to transform the expressions from your programs directly (take in input parsed code, return a different code structure to be executed). The quote and quasiquote functions are there to make that easy!
I don't know javascript enough, but in python you'd have to use eval and use some kind of parsing package crazyness if you wanted to implement a similar macro system!
As a scientist who has ended up gradually becoming more of a programmer, I battled through the SICP after seeing the cult following it has. It's a weird, but good book, and I couldn't imagine a book like that using anything other than Lisp