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There are a lot of people who want to do everything in Javascript. Frankly I don't get why people want to do that. And Lisp is not that hard to learn anyway. J

There are a lot of people who want to do everything in Javascript. Frankly I don't get why people want to do that. And Lisp is not that hard to learn anyway. Javascript tends to ruin everything eventually.

shepherdjerred 4y ago
> And Lisp is not that hard to learn anyway. Lisp is much, much harder to learn than JS is. Aside from that JS is a very transferrable skill, but Lisp is not.
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  You can learn lisp in half an hour. The hard part of emacs isn’t “lisp” it’s learning the libraries, just like it is in any other ecosystem. This difficulty would by present if everything was JS.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    You really think that the bottom 50% of programmers could learn lisp in 30 minutes?
    - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
      Lisp isn’t any harder to learn than JavaScript or Python.
      - shepherdjerred 4y ago
        Here's my response to a similar comment in this thread > I speak from my experience in college (~3-4 years ago) where, every year, 60% of the class dropped out of an AI class taught in common lisp because they couldn't understand it: https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=49&coid=79532 https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...
- sshine 4y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "learn". JS is much easier to become bad at quickly, which is not a bad thing. Lisp is an ever-expanding paradigm, but you can learn it at a steady pace like JS. JS is directly transferrable to similar-syntax languages, yes. But Lisp provides insight into techniques that will expand your knowledge and understanding of all programming languages. Does JS have a music video like this? (The Land of Lisp) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc
  - eimrine 4y ago
    > Does JS have a music video like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxi0ETwDvws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxi0ETwDvws ("Bug in the Javascript", not music video but video of musician performing vocal and harmonica parts of song)
- lispm 4y ago
  Given that JavaScript has roots in Lisp/Scheme , a lot of people report that learning Lisp helped them to better understand JavaScript.
- pmontra 4y ago
  I believe that you are right about trasferrability. About difficulty, it depends. If you start from C, Java or PHP then JS is easier than Lisp, at least until you get into the async stuff. If you start from vanilla Python, JS is more complicated so Lisp is not so much further away. If you start from scratch, they are both equally difficult.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    Yes, I agree with this. My statement was based on most programmers learning a C-style language first. If you have experience in a functional language then lisp will be much easier to learn.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    The things I learned from Common Lisp help me quite a bit in day-to-day JavaScript and Ruby development. The important transferable skills in programming are almost all language-independent, IMO.
- G3rn0ti 4y ago
  Here is the tree-sitter grammar of Elisp: https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/grammar.js https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/gramm... (approx. 200 lines) and here is the grammar of JavaScript: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript/blob/master/grammar.js https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript/blob/m... (approx. 1200 lines) JavaScript evolved into a language of similar complexity as Perl 5 (the corresponding tree sitter syntax table counts almost 2000 lines, currently).
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    I speak from my experience in college (~3-4 years ago) where, every year, 60% of the class dropped out of an AI class taught in common lisp because they couldn't understand it: https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=49&coid=79532 https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
It's the only programming language they know, since they grew out of being a "webmaster" but haven't learned properly about stacks of abstraction in computing.
- sph 4y ago
  The classic phenomenon of junior engineers that have become decent at programming but unexperienced enough that they want to rewrite everything, thinking they can surely do better. Now this is endemic in the JS world, especially because it is more ubiquitous than the previous beginner language, PHP.
theshrike79 4y ago
They have one tool in their toolbox: Javascript. They don't want to have another, so they change the world around them so that Javascript can be used for anything.

shepherdjerred 4y ago

> And Lisp is not that hard to learn anyway. Lisp is much, much harder to learn than JS is. Aside from that JS is a very transferrable skill, but Lisp is not.

fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
You can learn lisp in half an hour. The hard part of emacs isn’t “lisp” it’s learning the libraries, just like it is in any other ecosystem. This difficulty would by present if everything was JS.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  You really think that the bottom 50% of programmers could learn lisp in 30 minutes?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    Lisp isn’t any harder to learn than JavaScript or Python.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      Here's my response to a similar comment in this thread > I speak from my experience in college (~3-4 years ago) where, every year, 60% of the class dropped out of an AI class taught in common lisp because they couldn't understand it: https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=49&coid=79532 https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...
sshine 4y ago
It depends on what you mean by "learn". JS is much easier to become bad at quickly, which is not a bad thing. Lisp is an ever-expanding paradigm, but you can learn it at a steady pace like JS. JS is directly transferrable to similar-syntax languages, yes. But Lisp provides insight into techniques that will expand your knowledge and understanding of all programming languages. Does JS have a music video like this? (The Land of Lisp) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc
- eimrine 4y ago
  > Does JS have a music video like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxi0ETwDvws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxi0ETwDvws ("Bug in the Javascript", not music video but video of musician performing vocal and harmonica parts of song)
lispm 4y ago
Given that JavaScript has roots in Lisp/Scheme , a lot of people report that learning Lisp helped them to better understand JavaScript.
pmontra 4y ago
I believe that you are right about trasferrability. About difficulty, it depends. If you start from C, Java or PHP then JS is easier than Lisp, at least until you get into the async stuff. If you start from vanilla Python, JS is more complicated so Lisp is not so much further away. If you start from scratch, they are both equally difficult.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  Yes, I agree with this. My statement was based on most programmers learning a C-style language first. If you have experience in a functional language then lisp will be much easier to learn.
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  The things I learned from Common Lisp help me quite a bit in day-to-day JavaScript and Ruby development. The important transferable skills in programming are almost all language-independent, IMO.
G3rn0ti 4y ago
Here is the tree-sitter grammar of Elisp: https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/grammar.js https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/gramm... (approx. 200 lines) and here is the grammar of JavaScript: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript/blob/master/grammar.js https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript/blob/m... (approx. 1200 lines) JavaScript evolved into a language of similar complexity as Perl 5 (the corresponding tree sitter syntax table counts almost 2000 lines, currently).
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  I speak from my experience in college (~3-4 years ago) where, every year, 60% of the class dropped out of an AI class taught in common lisp because they couldn't understand it: https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=49&coid=79532 https://catalog.harding.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

It's the only programming language they know, since they grew out of being a "webmaster" but haven't learned properly about stacks of abstraction in computing.

sph 4y ago
The classic phenomenon of junior engineers that have become decent at programming but unexperienced enough that they want to rewrite everything, thinking they can surely do better. Now this is endemic in the JS world, especially because it is more ubiquitous than the previous beginner language, PHP.

theshrike79 4y ago

They have one tool in their toolbox: Javascript. They don't want to have another, so they change the world around them so that Javascript can be used for anything.