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This feels like something that someone completely removed from people who don't know how to program would say. I can't imagine the horrors I would've gone thro

This feels like something that someone completely removed from people who don't know how to program would say. I can't imagine the horrors I would've gone through if I couldn't fall back on the fact that my first language (C++) basically looked like the mathematical notation I was used to (infix binary operands, prefix functions). Until the standard is to write math in prefix (I'm definitely not condoning this), Lisp is not the right language to start with. This remains the biggest problem with places like HN. When everyone has a similar background, they can agree on conclusions that the rest of the world would find ludicrous.

luckydude 15y ago
As far as I know, the hacker news site is written in some lisp, with lots of lisp fans here. I'm with you though. Lisp can be great for some problems but it's mostly not. The lisp guys hate hearing that and shout you down. One measure of a language is how well it works to pass on a source base to a new team of programmers. I bet if someone were to go measure lisp against C they would find at least a 100x greater success rate with the passing on of C. The lisp guys are profoundly focussed on how easy it is for them to write code. The real world is more concerned with how easy it is to maintain, review, enhance code.
- eeperson 15y ago
  This seems like a strange accusation. It seems like the usual complaint is that lisp programmers are more concerned with elegance than getting anything accomplished. I think this provides an interesting counterpoint: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
  - tsotha 15y ago
    Heh. As much as I agree with pretty much everything he says in that presentation the GP's point is pretty relevant here: Rich Hickey is far, far to the right on the programming bell curve. Things normal people will have real difficulty grasping are going to seem glaringly obvious to someone like that.
jessewmc 15y ago
I think your horrors would have been abbreviated with less to fall back on. I TAed intro CS in Java for a couple years and the vast majority of fundamental misunderstandings students had were caused by preconceptions and expectations of how things should have worked based on exactly this kind of previous experience. I think I spent at least as much time helping people un-learn things as I helped them learn novel concepts. In the short term Java and C are friendlier, but this friendliness allows a student to put off confrontation with the essence of programming in a way lisps do not.
rayiner 15y ago
Programming is different enough from arithmetic that I don't know how much it helps. At my school, all engineering majors had to take freshman intro to programming in Scheme and it worked pretty well.
LearnYouALisp 15y ago
The responses to this article (and perhaps the article itself) somewhat miss that students learning how to program are not all the same.
sedachv 15y ago
I learned to code C from a book years before I touched Lisp, and knowing operator precedence didn't help me understand one bit about what the code was actually doing or where the rules of the language came from. It wasn't until I found SICP that I could claim to understand programming. The important thing about learning to program is having an accurate mental model of what goes on in your program. C, and especially C++, make that much harder than it actually is and the way Lisp presents it.

luckydude 15y ago

As far as I know, the hacker news site is written in some lisp, with lots of lisp fans here. I'm with you though. Lisp can be great for some problems but it's mostly not. The lisp guys hate hearing that and shout you down. One measure of a language is how well it works to pass on a source base to a new team of programmers. I bet if someone were to go measure lisp against C they would find at least a 100x greater success rate with the passing on of C. The lisp guys are profoundly focussed on how easy it is for them to write code. The real world is more concerned with how easy it is to maintain, review, enhance code.

eeperson 15y ago
This seems like a strange accusation. It seems like the usual complaint is that lisp programmers are more concerned with elegance than getting anything accomplished. I think this provides an interesting counterpoint: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
- tsotha 15y ago
  Heh. As much as I agree with pretty much everything he says in that presentation the GP's point is pretty relevant here: Rich Hickey is far, far to the right on the programming bell curve. Things normal people will have real difficulty grasping are going to seem glaringly obvious to someone like that.

jessewmc 15y ago

I think your horrors would have been abbreviated with less to fall back on. I TAed intro CS in Java for a couple years and the vast majority of fundamental misunderstandings students had were caused by preconceptions and expectations of how things should have worked based on exactly this kind of previous experience. I think I spent at least as much time helping people un-learn things as I helped them learn novel concepts. In the short term Java and C are friendlier, but this friendliness allows a student to put off confrontation with the essence of programming in a way lisps do not.

rayiner 15y ago

Programming is different enough from arithmetic that I don't know how much it helps. At my school, all engineering majors had to take freshman intro to programming in Scheme and it worked pretty well.

LearnYouALisp 15y ago

The responses to this article (and perhaps the article itself) somewhat miss that students learning how to program are not all the same.

sedachv 15y ago

I learned to code C from a book years before I touched Lisp, and knowing operator precedence didn't help me understand one bit about what the code was actually doing or where the rules of the language came from. It wasn't until I found SICP that I could claim to understand programming. The important thing about learning to program is having an accurate mental model of what goes on in your program. C, and especially C++, make that much harder than it actually is and the way Lisp presents it.