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I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor

I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators. Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is.

coldtea 9y ago
>Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style? >Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference. Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).
- zem 9y ago
  people's exposure to infix operators way precedes any dabbling with an algol language; it's the common notation that everyday mathematics has settled upon. you learn it in school.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
  >Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. BZZZZT! Wrong answer! I started with BASIC and transitioned from there to assembly language. Wrote several games and device drivers in assembly language (BASIC was too slow) and then learned Forth. Tried really hard to like Forth, and played with it for a while; loved some aspects of the language, but couldn't wrap my head around how to write a game with it, so I gave up and kept writing games in assembly language. Pascal was my next language, and that wasn't until later. Much later than that I finally got to C. You might think of BASIC as Algol-like, though I'd say it's more Fortran-like. Assembly language, though, is about un-Algol as a language can be, as is Forth.
didibus 9y ago
Some would go to fight with a Long Sword, others would prefer a Katana. I think that's fine. Master what works best for the way your mind and body works. That said, I'd hate for languages to adopt a lowest common denominator just so companies feel then that all programmers can replace any other and all code base is understandable by all. That would be like having every sword fighter fight with a knife. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is. I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Like I said, its possible the style doesn't bode with ya, and that's cool. That said, here's my anecdote. I also did Lisp in college and hated it. Thought it was stupid, had the worst most unreadable syntax I'd ever seen. It made every trivial thing hard, like why can't I just loop?!?, where are the variables?!?, how do I just do one thing followed by another?!?. Where do things start and end?!? I don't even remember what Lisp it was, but trust me, it was some academic cryptic variant, probably maintained by some teacher himself, had no library ecosystem, lacked documentation, the ugliest editor I'd ever seen. Anyways, moved on and never thought of it again. Then became a dev, did C++, some assembly, moved to ActionScript 3 lots of event programming, then C#, JavaScript, Java, all that. Suddenly, I gave Lisp another shot, at work, on a real project, not some school project, with Clojure. First thing I realized, there are libraries and documentation, and frameworks, you can set variables, loop, do infix even if you want too. There's easy ways to do imperative code, OOP, all that is there, I just couldn't see it before, I think it was college shadowing the obvious from me, and maybe my coding instincts weren't good enough then, so I couldn't recognise things if they looked and behaved slightly differently. Also, I had coworkers who used Lisp for real projects, commercially. I realised Lisps are often used in school for teaching theoretical programming concepts. But in practice, you'd not use Lisps like that, you'd use it like any other language. Anyways, eventually, I also got recursion, tail call, collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions and all that. Once I got all these things, it was like, how have I had been using anything else before. Now its such a drag to go back.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
  >I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. Like our pg? Who loves Lisp to death, and made his first major app (a web page store generator, if I recall) in Lisp? But then after selling it to Yahoo -- ported it to another language (Python?) so that other developers could actually modify it? It's not "lowest common denominator" to expect a language to stay within certain bounds of flexibility. If every single project has so many macros that it's effectively a DSL that no other programmer anywhere understands, then you've created a software package that becomes instantly unmaintainable if the wrong people get hit by a bus. In college, by the time I picked up Lisp, I had already used: * Assembly Language * Basic * Pascal * Forth * C++ * Recursion And I'd already worked on video games professionally (in 1987, in a project for Lucasfilm Games, before they became LucasArts). Java and C# had yet to be invented. At the time, there weren't libraries and documentation to speak of in any Lisp, so that's something. It was Common Lisp (as well as "elisp" on the Atari ST, which of course was completely incompatible...). Since then, I've used tail calls (in Lua, and soon coming to JavaScript), collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions, and all that, in many other languages. I just still hate Lisp, and while I have no problem understanding how to use Lisp, I don't see the advantage of using it over using other languages, and in particular I am finding static types to be critical in large system architecture, which are completely lacking in Clojure and other Lisps.

coldtea 9y ago

>Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style? >Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference. Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).

zem 9y ago
people's exposure to infix operators way precedes any dabbling with an algol language; it's the common notation that everyday mathematics has settled upon. you learn it in school.
SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
>Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. BZZZZT! Wrong answer! I started with BASIC and transitioned from there to assembly language. Wrote several games and device drivers in assembly language (BASIC was too slow) and then learned Forth. Tried really hard to like Forth, and played with it for a while; loved some aspects of the language, but couldn't wrap my head around how to write a game with it, so I gave up and kept writing games in assembly language. Pascal was my next language, and that wasn't until later. Much later than that I finally got to C. You might think of BASIC as Algol-like, though I'd say it's more Fortran-like. Assembly language, though, is about un-Algol as a language can be, as is Forth.

didibus 9y ago

Some would go to fight with a Long Sword, others would prefer a Katana. I think that's fine. Master what works best for the way your mind and body works. That said, I'd hate for languages to adopt a lowest common denominator just so companies feel then that all programmers can replace any other and all code base is understandable by all. That would be like having every sword fighter fight with a knife. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is. I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Like I said, its possible the style doesn't bode with ya, and that's cool. That said, here's my anecdote. I also did Lisp in college and hated it. Thought it was stupid, had the worst most unreadable syntax I'd ever seen. It made every trivial thing hard, like why can't I just loop?!?, where are the variables?!?, how do I just do one thing followed by another?!?. Where do things start and end?!? I don't even remember what Lisp it was, but trust me, it was some academic cryptic variant, probably maintained by some teacher himself, had no library ecosystem, lacked documentation, the ugliest editor I'd ever seen. Anyways, moved on and never thought of it again. Then became a dev, did C++, some assembly, moved to ActionScript 3 lots of event programming, then C#, JavaScript, Java, all that. Suddenly, I gave Lisp another shot, at work, on a real project, not some school project, with Clojure. First thing I realized, there are libraries and documentation, and frameworks, you can set variables, loop, do infix even if you want too. There's easy ways to do imperative code, OOP, all that is there, I just couldn't see it before, I think it was college shadowing the obvious from me, and maybe my coding instincts weren't good enough then, so I couldn't recognise things if they looked and behaved slightly differently. Also, I had coworkers who used Lisp for real projects, commercially. I realised Lisps are often used in school for teaching theoretical programming concepts. But in practice, you'd not use Lisps like that, you'd use it like any other language. Anyways, eventually, I also got recursion, tail call, collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions and all that. Once I got all these things, it was like, how have I had been using anything else before. Now its such a drag to go back.

SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
>I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. Like our pg? Who loves Lisp to death, and made his first major app (a web page store generator, if I recall) in Lisp? But then after selling it to Yahoo -- ported it to another language (Python?) so that other developers could actually modify it? It's not "lowest common denominator" to expect a language to stay within certain bounds of flexibility. If every single project has so many macros that it's effectively a DSL that no other programmer anywhere understands, then you've created a software package that becomes instantly unmaintainable if the wrong people get hit by a bus. In college, by the time I picked up Lisp, I had already used: * Assembly Language * Basic * Pascal * Forth * C++ * Recursion And I'd already worked on video games professionally (in 1987, in a project for Lucasfilm Games, before they became LucasArts). Java and C# had yet to be invented. At the time, there weren't libraries and documentation to speak of in any Lisp, so that's something. It was Common Lisp (as well as "elisp" on the Atari ST, which of course was completely incompatible...). Since then, I've used tail calls (in Lua, and soon coming to JavaScript), collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions, and all that, in many other languages. I just still hate Lisp, and while I have no problem understanding how to use Lisp, I don't see the advantage of using it over using other languages, and in particular I am finding static types to be critical in large system architecture, which are completely lacking in Clojure and other Lisps.