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I honestly haven't seen any evidence of this whole "think things you couldn't previously think" idea. The only interesting thing I've seen people be able to do

I honestly haven't seen any evidence of this whole "think things you couldn't previously think" idea. The only interesting thing I've seen people be able to do by switching languages, is significantly improving static analysis, in order to save debugging cycles and improve production reliability. But everything else that is "interesting" is just different ways to generate code in order to reduce lines of code written manually, which is convenient, and is certainly fun for nerds like most of us here, but I really don't see it as this superpower that folks like pg seem to believe it to be. A better analogy for new materials is new techniques, like machine learning and higher order abstractions over it, or new algorithms. But those are independent of languages.

ahefner 5y ago
It's a real thing, but I think (extrapolating from my own experience) it's much more profound and tangible if you're starting from something like C or pre-modern C++ and then moving to something more modern and FP-flavored. Modern popular language are on a much more even playing field versus 20 years ago. Even so, I still had one of these mind blowing "things I couldn't previously think" experiences when I finally ventured into Prolog and logic programming a few years ago. It's such an order of magnitude beyond my day to day C++ and Python nonsense, at least up until the evaluation model blows up exponentially. I'd still like, as a learning exercise, to build some semi-practical small applications in Prolog, but I feel like I'd need an expert mentor to guide me.
mr_luc 5y ago
I agree that there aren't a ton of convincing examples mentioned that aren't relevant to people who already agree w/the value of lisp-style macros -- but if you're interested I used the example of erlang when responding to a comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343140 FWIW I do actually agree w/pg about macros; I use them day-to-day for more mundane things than his impressive fully-bottom-up approach to programming. But each time I do use them, I feel like "thank heavens I don't have to reach for some weird external codegen tool to do this".
- sanderjd 5y ago
  See I don't really feel that way about macros. To me, codegen is codegen, useful for a bunch of stuff but not really anything special, and whether or not it is homoiconic doesn't seem like the fundamental question to me. Don't get me wrong, I think homoiconicity and macros are really neat, I can get behind the aesthetic appreciation of different programming languages and syntaxes for doing different things. But people seem to want to convince me that there is some mystical mind expanding power to it, rather than just aesthetic nicety, and that's what I find unconvincing.
SynthAnalytics 5y ago
I think it's really about an interplay of mental models and domains. Hers's my one personal datapoint. I did my undergrad in math and discovered functional programming back then. Got real excited about it, read the Learn You a Haskell book and then sort of nothing happened. But I waited on that "mind expanding" stuff to pay off. Then I got my first job, where they really only cared that I was good in python. Cranked out a bunch of python services, and got good at cloud stuff along the way. Decided FP and that kind of thing was "school stuff." A few years later I found myself working at another shop doing backend Go/Kotlin. We were increasingly writing a lot of streaming stuff on Kafka, and could tell we weren't really "doing it right." Just gut feel that something was not as good as it could be. So we brought in a senior eng with a bunch of Kafka experience, who just sort of coincidentally had been working in Scala during that experience. We onboarded him onto Kotlin, but the code pretty quickly picked up a Scala style and flavor. After about a year I couldn't shake the feeling of how perfectly this kind of functional thinking mapped to stream processing services. Especially when you're working on a framework like KStreams or Flink, being able to describe your transformations with these pure non-nullable functions was just perfect for the domain. When you squint a lot of the Option/Either monad stuff really helps you think about your programs as a linear flow of data, which is exactly what stream processing is. When you look at a lot of the Java api's in the space of big data, they look functional. AFAIK thats not because a bunch of Java devs decided to use all the cutting edge Java functional features. Its because the stuff people were building in Scala just fit the domain so much better. So the Java ecosystem took those ideas and everyone is for the better. At no point did I develop a superpower. Now I'm back to writing Python stuff in a new domain, and those insights aren't so valuable day to day. I try to make my code a bit more linear and functional, but can increasingly tell its not the practical choice. But if somebody needed me to write a high throughput reliable stream processing thing, I would immediately jump back to those patterns.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  I agree with all of this and have seen many of the same dynamics in my career, but it just doesn't seem like this mystical mind altering eureka thing that a lot of people seem to make it out to be. To me it's more like, oh good, here are some more useful techniques that help get stuff done sometimes.

ahefner 5y ago

It's a real thing, but I think (extrapolating from my own experience) it's much more profound and tangible if you're starting from something like C or pre-modern C++ and then moving to something more modern and FP-flavored. Modern popular language are on a much more even playing field versus 20 years ago. Even so, I still had one of these mind blowing "things I couldn't previously think" experiences when I finally ventured into Prolog and logic programming a few years ago. It's such an order of magnitude beyond my day to day C++ and Python nonsense, at least up until the evaluation model blows up exponentially. I'd still like, as a learning exercise, to build some semi-practical small applications in Prolog, but I feel like I'd need an expert mentor to guide me.

mr_luc 5y ago

I agree that there aren't a ton of convincing examples mentioned that aren't relevant to people who already agree w/the value of lisp-style macros -- but if you're interested I used the example of erlang when responding to a comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343140 FWIW I do actually agree w/pg about macros; I use them day-to-day for more mundane things than his impressive fully-bottom-up approach to programming. But each time I do use them, I feel like "thank heavens I don't have to reach for some weird external codegen tool to do this".

sanderjd 5y ago
See I don't really feel that way about macros. To me, codegen is codegen, useful for a bunch of stuff but not really anything special, and whether or not it is homoiconic doesn't seem like the fundamental question to me. Don't get me wrong, I think homoiconicity and macros are really neat, I can get behind the aesthetic appreciation of different programming languages and syntaxes for doing different things. But people seem to want to convince me that there is some mystical mind expanding power to it, rather than just aesthetic nicety, and that's what I find unconvincing.

SynthAnalytics 5y ago

I think it's really about an interplay of mental models and domains. Hers's my one personal datapoint. I did my undergrad in math and discovered functional programming back then. Got real excited about it, read the Learn You a Haskell book and then sort of nothing happened. But I waited on that "mind expanding" stuff to pay off. Then I got my first job, where they really only cared that I was good in python. Cranked out a bunch of python services, and got good at cloud stuff along the way. Decided FP and that kind of thing was "school stuff." A few years later I found myself working at another shop doing backend Go/Kotlin. We were increasingly writing a lot of streaming stuff on Kafka, and could tell we weren't really "doing it right." Just gut feel that something was not as good as it could be. So we brought in a senior eng with a bunch of Kafka experience, who just sort of coincidentally had been working in Scala during that experience. We onboarded him onto Kotlin, but the code pretty quickly picked up a Scala style and flavor. After about a year I couldn't shake the feeling of how perfectly this kind of functional thinking mapped to stream processing services. Especially when you're working on a framework like KStreams or Flink, being able to describe your transformations with these pure non-nullable functions was just perfect for the domain. When you squint a lot of the Option/Either monad stuff really helps you think about your programs as a linear flow of data, which is exactly what stream processing is. When you look at a lot of the Java api's in the space of big data, they look functional. AFAIK thats not because a bunch of Java devs decided to use all the cutting edge Java functional features. Its because the stuff people were building in Scala just fit the domain so much better. So the Java ecosystem took those ideas and everyone is for the better. At no point did I develop a superpower. Now I'm back to writing Python stuff in a new domain, and those insights aren't so valuable day to day. I try to make my code a bit more linear and functional, but can increasingly tell its not the practical choice. But if somebody needed me to write a high throughput reliable stream processing thing, I would immediately jump back to those patterns.

sanderjd 5y ago
I agree with all of this and have seen many of the same dynamics in my career, but it just doesn't seem like this mystical mind altering eureka thing that a lot of people seem to make it out to be. To me it's more like, oh good, here are some more useful techniques that help get stuff done sometimes.