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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

by 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.

by wglb 2y ago

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.