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I write Go for a living. I run Emacs. I read the first part of the article, thinking about how Lisp used in a personal project makes so much sense because you c

I write Go for a living. I run Emacs. I read the first part of the article, thinking about how Lisp used in a personal project makes so much sense because you can build the meta-language to your liking and not make something so weird you confuse your coworkers -- and then I got to the section on Go and I thought wow! This guy really doesn't get it! >On average, most shops have average people Yes, hello, that's me! I don't want to figure out some genius's Lisp code. Instead, Go forces the geniuses to write code that I can understand. >There was an essay about Lisp being a "language for smart people" that captured some of what would give me pause I think about this a LOT. There is a LOT of this blindness in software philosophical thinking. Just look at FOSS: everyone should be able to view and edit source code. Well that sure made a lot of sense when "everyone" was MIT students because they were Richard Stallman's audience. But it stops making sense to expect users to inspect source code when users aren't all MIT students. Likewise, use your smart person language on your personal project -- I'm sure it's great. I'll keep using the dumb people language. And get replaced by an LLM, I guess. But if an LLM can generate Go code (like the author surmises) and not Lisp then it might as well just emit machine code and put us all out of work so I don't know why he thinks Lisp is a moat

wglb 2y ago
I think that the idea that Lisp is for smart people is misguided and wrong. I don't think a person needs to be a genius to do well in Lisp. As a long-time C and Fortran and Python programmer (and many other languages) it took a long time for me to adjust to the different way of thinking necessitated by Lisp. Also if Copilot or LLM write Go code, why do we think it can't write Lisp code? I've dealt with code in many languages that were written by "geniuses" and find that they can be as hard to understand as any Lisp program. Often this depends on the problem being solved. There is a story about Donald Knuth and Edsger Dysktra working on a problem that required no less than four stacks to process. (If memory serves correctly, they found a solution using iteration rather than stacks that was much clearer to understand.) The solution of Sudoku by Peter Norvig (https://norvig.com/sudoku.html https://norvig.com/sudoku.html) is a bit of a genius solution but it is written in Python. It would be a disservice if the article's distinction of smart vs average were to dissuade anyone from learning a new language.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > I think that the idea that Lisp is for smart people is misguided and wrong. I think it's a misunderstanding. People think that other people are like them (and in particular, think like them). I think that some languages are a better fit for how some people think. Other languages are a better fit for how other people think. It's not "smart vs. dumb", it's different thinking styles. Now, if FP (or at least non-procedural) fits your thinking style better, and all you've known is procedural or OO languages, when you run across Lisp it's this amazing, magical experience. You never knew programming could be like this. It's enlightening and freeing. It just fits. But when you try to tell someone else, and they say, "Eh, Lisp never really clicked for me", you think: "How can it 'not click'? It's this wonderful, magical language!" It's really easy to assume "they're stupid" instead of "they think differently".
  - lispm 2y ago
    One idea of using Lisp is to learn new thinking styles for programming. Thinking styles are not fixed. For example an early hurdle in programming / computer science is recursion. Lisp gave the teachers a tool to teach thinking of software development in terms of programming with recursive functions&datastructures, starting with linked lists and operations for it... Unfortunately students often got the impression that Lisp is only good for learning new ways of thinking (in combination with a theory of recursive functions) and not for actual software development.

wglb 2y ago

I think that the idea that Lisp is for smart people is misguided and wrong. I don't think a person needs to be a genius to do well in Lisp. As a long-time C and Fortran and Python programmer (and many other languages) it took a long time for me to adjust to the different way of thinking necessitated by Lisp. Also if Copilot or LLM write Go code, why do we think it can't write Lisp code? I've dealt with code in many languages that were written by "geniuses" and find that they can be as hard to understand as any Lisp program. Often this depends on the problem being solved. There is a story about Donald Knuth and Edsger Dysktra working on a problem that required no less than four stacks to process. (If memory serves correctly, they found a solution using iteration rather than stacks that was much clearer to understand.) The solution of Sudoku by Peter Norvig (https://norvig.com/sudoku.html https://norvig.com/sudoku.html) is a bit of a genius solution but it is written in Python. It would be a disservice if the article's distinction of smart vs average were to dissuade anyone from learning a new language.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> I think that the idea that Lisp is for smart people is misguided and wrong. I think it's a misunderstanding. People think that other people are like them (and in particular, think like them). I think that some languages are a better fit for how some people think. Other languages are a better fit for how other people think. It's not "smart vs. dumb", it's different thinking styles. Now, if FP (or at least non-procedural) fits your thinking style better, and all you've known is procedural or OO languages, when you run across Lisp it's this amazing, magical experience. You never knew programming could be like this. It's enlightening and freeing. It just fits. But when you try to tell someone else, and they say, "Eh, Lisp never really clicked for me", you think: "How can it 'not click'? It's this wonderful, magical language!" It's really easy to assume "they're stupid" instead of "they think differently".
- lispm 2y ago
  One idea of using Lisp is to learn new thinking styles for programming. Thinking styles are not fixed. For example an early hurdle in programming / computer science is recursion. Lisp gave the teachers a tool to teach thinking of software development in terms of programming with recursive functions&datastructures, starting with linked lists and operations for it... Unfortunately students often got the impression that Lisp is only good for learning new ways of thinking (in combination with a theory of recursive functions) and not for actual software development.