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> Eric Raymond went so far as to say that understanding LISP is a “profound enlightenment experience.” Maybe this is true for language hobbyists or whatever, b

> Eric Raymond went so far as to say that understanding LISP is a “profound enlightenment experience.” Maybe this is true for language hobbyists or whatever, but every few years throughout my career, I went back to LISP or LISP-like languages and never found it super profound. Do I need to spend more time on a project? I just don't get the same excitement others seem to get.

cracrecry 5y ago
> Do I need to spend more time on a project? It depends on your interest. For me in particular Lisp was a "profound enlightenment experience" because: 1. I have been programming for a long time and had so many problems I could not(in practice) solve in any language but Lisp. 2. Lisp gives you two things no other language gives you: very basic Metaprograming(it can read itself) and the ability to design your own DSL(domain specific language). 3. It also gives you REPL(Read eval print loop) immediate feedback other languages tried to copy(but have not been able to replicate entirely). Having said that, Lisp design is also obsolete today because it was mainly designed in the 1970s. I hate it (specially parentheses and interface) and love it at the same time. >Do I need to spend more time on a project? You don't need to do anything, nobody needs to learn a new language for living. The fastest way to understand what Lisp is all about is to be near a very proficient Lisp programmer, because he will be able to run circles around you solving problems. That combination of someone proving to you what is possible at the masters level and natural human competition is probably much more powerful than anything else you could do on your own. We are humans after all, we see a great hunter hunt and only then we desire to be as good as he is and learn from him. We do it subconsciously and that is the reason elite tennis players sell razors so well, people copy naturally those who they admire without being conscious about it.
p_l 5y ago
Some of it is because a lot of features that used to be unique in Lisp (or few other "rare" languages) became way more available in other languages - partially thanks to Lisp&co popularising them first. Other stuff is that it tends to take some time working, and actually ending up using some of the more interesting bits, to see effect. Lots of people for example talk about macros when it comes to homoiconicity, but rarely (outside of old lisp wizards) do I see people going further to how Lisp makes it easy to build languages and compilers that are easy to debug and handle - I'm not just talking about the common idea trope of "write DSL for your program", because a) you're going to write a partial language specific to your program anyway, no matter the language, you might just obfuscate it calling them functions and types b) the easy manipulation of code and lack of parsing (and thus poof goes half the dragon book) means that writing compilers is simply... simple. And with CL's macroexpand and similar features in other lisps, it tends to be much easier to figure what is going wrong (and it's reasonably easy to add reporting of errors in compiled code down to specific form)

cracrecry 5y ago

> Do I need to spend more time on a project? It depends on your interest. For me in particular Lisp was a "profound enlightenment experience" because: 1. I have been programming for a long time and had so many problems I could not(in practice) solve in any language but Lisp. 2. Lisp gives you two things no other language gives you: very basic Metaprograming(it can read itself) and the ability to design your own DSL(domain specific language). 3. It also gives you REPL(Read eval print loop) immediate feedback other languages tried to copy(but have not been able to replicate entirely). Having said that, Lisp design is also obsolete today because it was mainly designed in the 1970s. I hate it (specially parentheses and interface) and love it at the same time. >Do I need to spend more time on a project? You don't need to do anything, nobody needs to learn a new language for living. The fastest way to understand what Lisp is all about is to be near a very proficient Lisp programmer, because he will be able to run circles around you solving problems. That combination of someone proving to you what is possible at the masters level and natural human competition is probably much more powerful than anything else you could do on your own. We are humans after all, we see a great hunter hunt and only then we desire to be as good as he is and learn from him. We do it subconsciously and that is the reason elite tennis players sell razors so well, people copy naturally those who they admire without being conscious about it.

p_l 5y ago

Some of it is because a lot of features that used to be unique in Lisp (or few other "rare" languages) became way more available in other languages - partially thanks to Lisp&co popularising them first. Other stuff is that it tends to take some time working, and actually ending up using some of the more interesting bits, to see effect. Lots of people for example talk about macros when it comes to homoiconicity, but rarely (outside of old lisp wizards) do I see people going further to how Lisp makes it easy to build languages and compilers that are easy to debug and handle - I'm not just talking about the common idea trope of "write DSL for your program", because a) you're going to write a partial language specific to your program anyway, no matter the language, you might just obfuscate it calling them functions and types b) the easy manipulation of code and lack of parsing (and thus poof goes half the dragon book) means that writing compilers is simply... simple. And with CL's macroexpand and similar features in other lisps, it tends to be much easier to figure what is going wrong (and it's reasonably easy to add reporting of errors in compiled code down to specific form)