Lisp

In the information security business, one tends to hear more about the low-level aspects of programming than the elegant, academic ones. Lisp is an example of something that has fallen by the wayside. Lisp is a computer programming language, but it is vastly different than most languages you are most likely familiar with. Instead of using 2 + 2 for addition, it would be written as (+ 2 2). While this can seem complicated at the smaller level, this syntax can allow for elegance at a larger scale. For example, it is easier to write (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) than to write each number with an operator between it and the next one. It also makes order of operations confusions which are common in C hard to come by. you know for a fact that each groupings or parenthesis evaluates before the enclosing one. (* (+ 1 2) (-5 2)) is much clearer than the alternative.

Learning about lisp isn't going to make you a better exploit researcher, but it can make you a better tool-writer to leverage the exploits that you find. Lisp's syntactic power comes from macros. Imagine that you have a program which involves repetitive code, such as database probing, xml parsing, or something similar. Macros allow you to say "Every time I say something like this, interpret it like this." It is the C preprocessor on steroids For example, if you code up a script which connects to a server on a port, executes a piece of code, and transmits the return value to the server. With a macro, you could just wrap that up in a send(function operand1 operand2) notation. Also, lisp allows for functional programming, lazy evaluation, and object-oriented programming with the Common Lisp Object System. Lisp is truly a gentleman's language. Grasping lisp will make you a better programmer, even if you primarily code in another language.

A wiki page can only scratch the surface of Lisp's elegance. Anyone interested needs to read Paul Grahm's (now free) book, which is available here:

[http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf ]On Lisp