4 ms·

LISP fetishism must be resisted every time it appears. Programmers who learn LISP and think they have become enlightened are no different than drunks who rambl

LISP fetishism must be resisted every time it appears. Programmers who learn LISP and think they have become enlightened are no different than drunks who ramble on about how it is impossible to know if the colors they see are the same as the colors you see.

Phiwise_ 3y ago
It's a strange sort of Lisp fetishism that wants to bring back Smalltalk instead of Lisp.
- lproven 3y ago
  Exactly! :-)
lproven 3y ago
I'm not a Lisp fetishist and I personally find it nearly as unreadable as Perl and APL. The article is in fact expressing my admiration of Dylan, if you look more closely, and Smalltalk and other things of that ilk. Lisp was a tremendously important step... In 1959. They should have continued with the planned Lisp-2, but they didn't, and sadly, McCarthy is dead now. In its absence, Dylan is about the best candidate for a Lisp-2 we have.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  As a somehow lisp head, and even though I mellowed with time, especially about syntax, I still don't think there's anything wrong with sexps. It might be a neurological trait, some people just can't live with a syntactic layer.. their brain might rejoy with it, think clearer and faster. I, for one, is the opposite, it removes one dimension in the problem space, and structural edition is so cute. I also have a tiny personal bet that in 30 years, if people are still writing code.. someone will make sexps mainstream.. just like closures are now, just like tree processing / ast / transpiling is mainstream now.. it just take time to cook the mainstream.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > It might be a neurological trait, some people just can't live with a syntactic layer Genuinely, I think this is the case, and it might be one of the biggest tragedies in computing history. There is a type of brain that can deal happily with bare S-exps and once it learns to do so, sees syntactic sugar as waste. As a result, that type of brain dominated Lisp's evolution and so the Lisp mainstream never got past that. But, I suspect, most brains can't. And so demonstrably inferior languages thrived because they were prettier, or sweeter if that fits.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      My brain just loves reduction and homogeneity and sexps / fp hits very high on this. It's like vector math, the building blocks are simple, the rest is on you. And at the same time, I also remember enjoying the 'magic' of php array/map syntax .. it felt magical (thanks to dynamic loosely typed semantics too I guess). But rapidly you hit syntactic hurdles that just don't exist in function based languages. Then there are tribal effects, when a bunch of guys work in python or else, they'll love it, and resist anything too alien (even if .. under the clothes, it's mostly a limited common lisp :)
      - lproven 3y ago
        > My brain just loves reduction and homogeneity and sexps / fp hits very high on this. OK then! Good for you. With great effort I can just barely follow what is going on; it is so very much not my thing. But we all have different strengths and weaknesses. > Then there are tribal effects This is so very true and much underestimated. Unix isn't an OS: it's a mindset and a set of cultural traditions, that have led multiple groups of people to re-implement the same style of OS over and over and over again. And now, it's so pervasive that many can't imagine anything else. I personally come from an era when rich complex GUI OSes fit into a single digit number of megabytes, and were amenable to exploration and comprehension by a single non-specialist individual in their spare time, without external materials or help. And I think that was hugely valuable and important, and we've lost it. We threw it away with the trash not realising how vital it was.

Phiwise_ 3y ago

It's a strange sort of Lisp fetishism that wants to bring back Smalltalk instead of Lisp.

lproven 3y ago
Exactly! :-)

lproven 3y ago

I'm not a Lisp fetishist and I personally find it nearly as unreadable as Perl and APL. The article is in fact expressing my admiration of Dylan, if you look more closely, and Smalltalk and other things of that ilk. Lisp was a tremendously important step... In 1959. They should have continued with the planned Lisp-2, but they didn't, and sadly, McCarthy is dead now. In its absence, Dylan is about the best candidate for a Lisp-2 we have.

agumonkey 3y ago
As a somehow lisp head, and even though I mellowed with time, especially about syntax, I still don't think there's anything wrong with sexps. It might be a neurological trait, some people just can't live with a syntactic layer.. their brain might rejoy with it, think clearer and faster. I, for one, is the opposite, it removes one dimension in the problem space, and structural edition is so cute. I also have a tiny personal bet that in 30 years, if people are still writing code.. someone will make sexps mainstream.. just like closures are now, just like tree processing / ast / transpiling is mainstream now.. it just take time to cook the mainstream.
- lproven 3y ago
  > It might be a neurological trait, some people just can't live with a syntactic layer Genuinely, I think this is the case, and it might be one of the biggest tragedies in computing history. There is a type of brain that can deal happily with bare S-exps and once it learns to do so, sees syntactic sugar as waste. As a result, that type of brain dominated Lisp's evolution and so the Lisp mainstream never got past that. But, I suspect, most brains can't. And so demonstrably inferior languages thrived because they were prettier, or sweeter if that fits.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    My brain just loves reduction and homogeneity and sexps / fp hits very high on this. It's like vector math, the building blocks are simple, the rest is on you. And at the same time, I also remember enjoying the 'magic' of php array/map syntax .. it felt magical (thanks to dynamic loosely typed semantics too I guess). But rapidly you hit syntactic hurdles that just don't exist in function based languages. Then there are tribal effects, when a bunch of guys work in python or else, they'll love it, and resist anything too alien (even if .. under the clothes, it's mostly a limited common lisp :)
    - lproven 3y ago
      > My brain just loves reduction and homogeneity and sexps / fp hits very high on this. OK then! Good for you. With great effort I can just barely follow what is going on; it is so very much not my thing. But we all have different strengths and weaknesses. > Then there are tribal effects This is so very true and much underestimated. Unix isn't an OS: it's a mindset and a set of cultural traditions, that have led multiple groups of people to re-implement the same style of OS over and over and over again. And now, it's so pervasive that many can't imagine anything else. I personally come from an era when rich complex GUI OSes fit into a single digit number of megabytes, and were amenable to exploration and comprehension by a single non-specialist individual in their spare time, without external materials or help. And I think that was hugely valuable and important, and we've lost it. We threw it away with the trash not realising how vital it was.