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Why do so many HN'ers like lisp? It's just... archaic.

abecedarius 6y ago
You could've phrased your question in a way that's not like dissing someone's fashion sense. That aside, I think Lisp is genuinely at a sweet spot for the product of nice-to-program-with and simple-to-implement. It's historically important besides, and there's lots of code worth reading in it (SICP and PAIP just to start).
chriswarbo 6y ago
Would you care to elaborate, in some tangible, concrete way?
sevensor 6y ago
You'll find there are also plenty of people on here who like Forth, and even a few Fortran partisans. There are lots of ways to gratify your curiosity.
InfiniteRand 6y ago
Ask Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
submeta 6y ago
Because Lisp has positively influenced many programming paradigms du-jour, it is profound, intellectually satisfying to program in, and to some people's eyes it is a beautiful language, easy to prototype in, easy to write DSLs with. A perfect tool for a hacker-minded programmer.
aidenn0 6y ago
Common lisp has the best tooling of any dynamic programming language.
- remexre 6y ago
  For real -- SLIME's almost 2 decades old, and having used it makes me hate developing Python and JavaScript; being able to fix up broken code when it throws an exception, without having to restart the program is just so dang nice during development. Being able to get completions etc. based on the real state of the real program (as opposed to the results of some imprecise static analysis) is super-nice as well.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    > Being able to get completions etc. based on the real state of the real program (as opposed to the results of some imprecise static analysis) is super-nice as well That's one reason that I said of any dynamic language. Static languages have different tradeoffs of tooling -- you're not going to redefine a function in them anyways, but perfect static analysis for lots of things becomes almost trivial, since the compiler has all of that information available to it.
blacktriangle 6y ago
Funny, Common Lisp makes most other languages look archaic. CLOS is what OOP is supposed to be, real macros make every other attempt at metaprogramming look bad, restarts make exceptions feel constraining, and the standard actually thought through how to dynamically work with your code base at the REPL. It feels like every other language started from the point of "I like lisp, but this one feature is too dangerous, let me remove that."
throwaway59553 6y ago
The only thing that is archaic is having awful development cycles because most languages don't provide a repl to test ideas. Pretty much every LISP does.

You could've phrased your question in a way that's not like dissing someone's fashion sense. That aside, I think Lisp is genuinely at a sweet spot for the product of nice-to-program-with and simple-to-implement. It's historically important besides, and there's lots of code worth reading in it (SICP and PAIP just to start).

chriswarbo 6y ago

Would you care to elaborate, in some tangible, concrete way?

sevensor 6y ago

You'll find there are also plenty of people on here who like Forth, and even a few Fortran partisans. There are lots of ways to gratify your curiosity.

InfiniteRand 6y ago

Ask Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

submeta 6y ago

Because Lisp has positively influenced many programming paradigms du-jour, it is profound, intellectually satisfying to program in, and to some people's eyes it is a beautiful language, easy to prototype in, easy to write DSLs with. A perfect tool for a hacker-minded programmer.

aidenn0 6y ago

Common lisp has the best tooling of any dynamic programming language.

remexre 6y ago
For real -- SLIME's almost 2 decades old, and having used it makes me hate developing Python and JavaScript; being able to fix up broken code when it throws an exception, without having to restart the program is just so dang nice during development. Being able to get completions etc. based on the real state of the real program (as opposed to the results of some imprecise static analysis) is super-nice as well.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  > Being able to get completions etc. based on the real state of the real program (as opposed to the results of some imprecise static analysis) is super-nice as well That's one reason that I said of any dynamic language. Static languages have different tradeoffs of tooling -- you're not going to redefine a function in them anyways, but perfect static analysis for lots of things becomes almost trivial, since the compiler has all of that information available to it.

blacktriangle 6y ago

Funny, Common Lisp makes most other languages look archaic. CLOS is what OOP is supposed to be, real macros make every other attempt at metaprogramming look bad, restarts make exceptions feel constraining, and the standard actually thought through how to dynamically work with your code base at the REPL. It feels like every other language started from the point of "I like lisp, but this one feature is too dangerous, let me remove that."

throwaway59553 6y ago

The only thing that is archaic is having awful development cycles because most languages don't provide a repl to test ideas. Pretty much every LISP does.