Is Lisp the most powerful language?

>>55846749
For you!

>>55846749
Only if your name is Paul Graham
(I love lisp though)

>>55846749

From one point of view all languages are equally powerful. From another, the more "patterns" you have, the less powerful the language is.

Personally, I think the ability to prove theorems at compile-time is powerful. So I learned the Shen dialect of Lisp; and also the Ciao extensions to Prolog. Then after all that I decided power was not, in fact, what I wanted but simplicity so went back to Oberon-07.

Is land of lisp a good book to learn from? or are there better ones?

>>55847285
Some people love it, others hate it, but it's a solid introduction. Personally I found the humor to be a bit forced and childish, but I prefer the dry textbooks approach.
Other options are 'On Lisp' written by the insufferable Paul Graham, but a great text if you can read past the everything-that-isn't-lisp-bashing.
For a more learning-by-doing approach 'Practical Common Lisp' is the goto text and is freely available online.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

>>55847502
tell me about this graham character and why he is insufferable

>>55846749
No. It's one of most enlightening languages, if you learn it from sources like SICP, but the most powerful are languages like C/C++ who allow changes in memory and system itself

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>>55847543
>who allow changes in memory and system itself

>>55847525
Co-founder of viaweb and Y-combinator.
Basically because he can't shut up about how great he is and how great lisp is and about how lisp programmers are enlightened, but by all means, read some of his essays:
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

>>55847590
But this is the most powerful. If you fuck it up yourself, it just means you were to incompetent to use power correctly

>>55846749
English.

You can't manually manage memory in lisp so it's not.