Paul Graham , founder of Y Combinator and a fan of the LISP programming language , announced on Saturday that he has released his own LISP programming language , called Bel .
The creation of the Bel language is really interesting because it is a continuation of one of the oldest high-level programming languages. This is very important, especially in our era when front-end JavaScript frameworks appear and disappear in the space of a week.
The history of the LISP
The LISP programming language was released in 1958, when the paper “ Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I ” by mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy was published. In fact, McCarthy did not aim to create a programming language, but a mathematical notation system for algorithms. Later, researcher Steve Russell studied McCarthy’s work and created the first LISP interpreter on an IBM 704 computer
For decades, computer scientists have been working with LISP. The language has been divided into many distinct dialects, which have been used in various programs. Also, much of the early work in the field of artificial intelligence was written in LISP.
There are several programmers, even today, who are fanatical supporters of the LISP language. Among them are Paul Graham and Eric Raymond. These scientists believe that it is the best programming language.
LISP is ideal for creating codethat is readable and "expressive." Peter Serbel has said:
“… a Common Lisp program provides a much clearer mapping between your ideas about how the program should work and the code you actually write… This language allows you to develop code more quickly.”.
Many people believe that learning the LISP language makes someone a better programmer.
Eric Raymond wrote the following in his essay titled “How to Become a Hacker”:
"It's worth learning Lisp. This experience will make you a better programmer, even if you never use Lisp in the future.".
New programming language: Bel
As mentioned above, Bel was created by Graham. Graham also created the LISP dialect, Arc.
In the new Bel dialect, Graham has attempted to create a language that, while having some minor differences, is remarkably similar to the original LISP language.
Graham is trying to keep Bel in the "incubation period" as long as possible, as was the case with LISP in its early stages (when it was created by McCarthy).
Graham wrote about it:
"Bel is an attempt to answer the following question: what happens if, instead of moving to implementation as soon as possible, you try to delay it as long as possible?".
Graham essentially wants to answer the question: “If computers were as powerful as we wanted them to be, what would languages look like?”.
The creation of the Bel dialect is an interesting experiment. Time will tell where it will end up.
Graham published a guide to the programming language and some of the source code. However, as he himself wrote: “It is not a language you can use to program computers, any more than Lisp was in the 1960s.”.
Graham doesn't plan to write an official appthat would allow developers to write programs in Bel, but he believes the community will try to do so.
