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I personally think the "code as data" concept is not so important in lisp. It is critical to writing macros, but you often don't write macros and beginners to l

I personally think the "code as data" concept is not so important in lisp. It is critical to writing macros, but you often don't write macros and beginners to lisp often abuse macros. I've written Clojure professionally now for a couple years and am pretty fast and proficient at it, but when I write a function call, I don't think of it as a list, even though that is what it is. I don't think any lisper does. It's just a function with arguments and I'm writing in the syntax necessary, which happens to be a list. In those rare occasions where I think a macro is necessary, sure, it helps that a function call is a list, but that's hardly the main role in a day's work.

ohyes 10y ago
With respect to Clojure, you don't write macros, but many of the really interesting language features within Clojure are built upon macros. (core.async and core.match come to mind). It would be difficult to add them without macros. I do actually think of my code as a tree/graph structure. Not just in lisps but in other languages as well, I'm always manipulating a stack of trees and thinking about how the data flows through the branches.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  > many of the really interesting language features within Clojure are built upon macros That's true with any lisp. But that doesn't mean the the ability to write macros is a requirement for most development work on a daily basis, and homoiconicity is often touted as amazing specifically because of its help in writing macros. Therefore, since writing macros is not super common or necessary most of the time, I would say that "code as data" is also not a big deal most of the time. I really like lisp, I just don't think some of its unique features are as big a deal as they advertise.
  - einhverfr 10y ago
    code as data, however, does become an important concept in becoming really good at Perl or Python (and I would assume Ruby etc), and understanding common pitfalls here also helps one spot, for example, LSP problems and provide better solutions (because most LSP problems can be solved by replacing a mutator with something that returns a new object). In Javascript, also, effectively you have to work with code as data. So this isn't just about writing macros. There are a lot of areas where this does touch things.

ohyes 10y ago

With respect to Clojure, you don't write macros, but many of the really interesting language features within Clojure are built upon macros. (core.async and core.match come to mind). It would be difficult to add them without macros. I do actually think of my code as a tree/graph structure. Not just in lisps but in other languages as well, I'm always manipulating a stack of trees and thinking about how the data flows through the branches.

hellofunk 10y ago
> many of the really interesting language features within Clojure are built upon macros That's true with any lisp. But that doesn't mean the the ability to write macros is a requirement for most development work on a daily basis, and homoiconicity is often touted as amazing specifically because of its help in writing macros. Therefore, since writing macros is not super common or necessary most of the time, I would say that "code as data" is also not a big deal most of the time. I really like lisp, I just don't think some of its unique features are as big a deal as they advertise.
- einhverfr 10y ago
  code as data, however, does become an important concept in becoming really good at Perl or Python (and I would assume Ruby etc), and understanding common pitfalls here also helps one spot, for example, LSP problems and provide better solutions (because most LSP problems can be solved by replacing a mutator with something that returns a new object). In Javascript, also, effectively you have to work with code as data. So this isn't just about writing macros. There are a lot of areas where this does touch things.