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  5. Common Lisp vs GraphQL

Common Lisp vs GraphQL

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145
GraphQL
GraphQL
Stacks34.9K
Followers28.1K
Votes309

Common Lisp vs GraphQL: What are the differences?

Introduction: Common Lisp and GraphQL are both technologies used in software development, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features.

  1. Data Querying: In Common Lisp, the focus is on general-purpose programming and creating various applications, whereas GraphQL is specifically designed for querying and manipulating data in APIs. Common Lisp does not have a built-in querying language like GraphQL, which enables clients to request only the data they need from the server, reducing over-fetching and under-fetching.

  2. Type System: Common Lisp is a dynamically typed language, allowing variables to take on different types at runtime, while GraphQL has a strict type system that defines the structure of data that can be queried. This ensures data consistency and enables better error checking in GraphQL, which is not as enforced in Common Lisp due to its dynamic nature.

  3. Scalability: Common Lisp is typically used for developing standalone applications or back-end systems, which may not be as scalable as applications using GraphQL. GraphQL is often utilized in client-server architectures, where it can efficiently handle complex data dependencies and serve multiple clients concurrently, making it more scalable for modern web applications.

  4. Learning Curve: Common Lisp, being a mature language with a long history, may have a steeper learning curve for beginners compared to GraphQL, which has gained popularity in recent years for its simplicity and efficiency in handling data queries. The syntax and concepts of Common Lisp may require more time and effort to master, while GraphQL's intuitive querying language can be picked up relatively quickly.

  5. Community Support: Common Lisp has a smaller but dedicated community of developers and resources, which may limit the availability of libraries, tools, and support compared to the extensive community backing GraphQL. The active GraphQL community provides numerous guides, tutorials, and extensions, making it easier for developers to adopt and use GraphQL in their projects with ample community support.

In Summary, Common Lisp and GraphQL differ in their focus on data querying, type systems, scalability, learning curves, and community support, catering to distinct needs in software development.

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Detailed Comparison

Common Lisp
Common Lisp
GraphQL
GraphQL

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

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Hierarchical;Product-centric;Client-specified queries;Backwards Compatible;Structured, Arbitrary Code;Application-Layer Protocol;Strongly-typed;Introspective
Statistics
Stacks
268
Stacks
34.9K
Followers
255
Followers
28.1K
Votes
145
Votes
309
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community
Pros
  • 75
    Schemas defined by the requests made by the user
  • 63
    Will replace RESTful interfaces
  • 62
    The future of API's
  • 49
    The future of databases
  • 12
    Self-documenting
Cons
  • 4
    More code to type.
  • 4
    Hard to migrate from GraphQL to another technology
  • 2
    Takes longer to build compared to schemaless.
  • 1
    All the pros sound like NFT pitches
  • 1
    Works just like any other API at runtime

What are some alternatives to Common Lisp, GraphQL?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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