4 ms·

Homoiconicity is the googlable term. The first Lisp book that blew my mind is SICP, nowadays free: https://sicp.me/sicp.pdf https://sicp.me/sicp.pdf I think you

• kbp 8y ago
  I remember finding it pretty revelatory the first time I saw LET defined as a macro like (defmacro let (bindings &body body) `((lambda ,(mapcar #'first bindings) ,@body) ,@(mapcar #'second bindings))) Seeing it use MAPCAR like that just made something click for me for whatever reason.
  • disconcision 8y ago
    To add on, Racket in particular has some very slick syntax for writing these kinds of things: (define-syntax-rule (let ([id expr] ...) body ...) ((λ (id ...) body ...) expr ...))
    • yomly 8y ago
      I definitely liked this about Racket but I did also find the elipses to be a bit magic to begin with...
      • disconcision 8y ago
        As with all things, the trick to chase the magic away is to implement them. I recently made a little term rewriting library using racket/match syntax but with the pattern/templates specifiable at runtime. Ellipses were a bit confusing to begin with but when you break list patterns down into cons pairs + a cons-like pattern binary combinator to represent ellipses, it started making sense. The unexpected thing for me was that I thought nested ellipses were going to be the tough part, but it turns out they actually just... work.
• taylorwood 8y ago
  Stuart Sierra has an interesting talk on homoiconicity and its history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7zyGMcav3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7zyGMcav3c