3 ms·

God, Lisp is beautiful. You look at some of the older languages of yore and think, my god, how did people survive? Then you see a Lisp program in all it's homoi

God, Lisp is beautiful. You look at some of the older languages of yore and think, my god, how did people survive? Then you see a Lisp program in all it's homoiconic glory, and it looks just as good in 2018 as it did in the 1960s. A true testament to the expressiveness and generality of expression based programming and the lambda calculus.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gnulinux 8y ago
This 1960 program is much better looking than pretty much all 2018 programs I saw. There definitely are some exceptions, but it's hard to get lisp wrong whereas it's too damn easy to get most 2018 languages wrong.
- jorams 8y ago
  > it's hard to get lisp wrong That's not actually true, Lisp offers endless possibilities to work yourself into a hole. The average 1960s program was just written by someone a bit more knowledgeable and caring, who took a lot more time to get things right, than the vast majority of modern programming work.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    And the average 1960s program was written on a blackboard first. Computer time was expensive! I think being forced to confront the cost of the program ahead of time sharpened programmers' wits.
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      My first Lisp program was entered via punch cards. This was the early 1970s.