NewLisp

Better spend your time learning Clojure, Racket, Scheme or Common Lisp. NewLisp repeats the design mistakes of ancient Lisps that were fixed in the newer Lisps, like dynamic scoping and interpreting only instead of compiling which makes it much slower than other Lisps. NewLisp should be called OldLisp. It also adds some mistakes of its own, like deep copying everything when you pass it around. And making `cons` act like `list` when the second argument is not a list.

<i>It is especially well-suited for applications in AI...</i><p>&#60;Groan&#62;. I wish people would stop putting "lisp" and "AI" in the same sentence. How many decades did lisp languish because people thought there was no reason to learn it if they weren't doing AI?

Can someone explain NewLisp's memory management model to me? The description here: <a href="http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html</a> makes it sound like NewLisp essentially uses something like an std::auto_ptr from C++ for all its references, but I'm not sure how its possible to write a Lisp where you only ever have one reference to things.

When I read any well written Lisp code I feel my awareness of the subject gets cleaner, sharper and lighter. I never experienced a similar thing with other languages. I am not belittling them, or criticising. It is just a deep personal feeling, that has been lasting since university times, back in the 90s.<p>I liked the code that I have seen at newlisp.org, newlisper.wordpress.com (for example) and I am eager to see what I can do with it.<p>After reading so many pages (including this one), on so many sites, I have decided that I will learn newlisp too.