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It feels to me, people suggesting using anything other than Lisp haven't had sufficient, heartfelt experience with Lisps. Give me a Lisp any day, sure, Elisp mi

It feels to me, people suggesting using anything other than Lisp haven't had sufficient, heartfelt experience with Lisps. Give me a Lisp any day, sure, Elisp might not be a best of Lisps, but it's a Lisp nonetheless, there's simply nothing better for evaluating things on the fly, there's no better language for rapid prototyping, for structural editing, for metaprogramming. One has to experience the flow, the fluidity, the functional constructs of Lisp to truly appreciate its elegance and expressiveness. Lisp's code-as-data philosophy enables seamless metaprogramming, where code can be treated as data and manipulated with the same ease as data structures. This unlocks a level of abstraction and composability that is unmatched by most other languages. The functional nature of Lisp, combined with its homoiconicity, encourages a declarative and modular programming style, promoting code reuse and maintainability. Once one immerses themselves in the Lisp way of thinking, the flow of writing code becomes a harmonious dance, where complex problems are broken down into simple, composable functions that can be effortlessly combined and transformed. It's a paradigm that fosters creativity and empowers developers to build robust and extensible systems with remarkable ease. Sure, Python, Lua, Javascript, etc. They all may seem more familiar, and yet they lack the profound simplicity and expressiveness that lies at the heart of Lisp. While these languages have their own merits and widespread adoption, they are ultimately constrained by their rigid syntax and imperative nature. Lisp, on the other hand, transcends these limitations with its minimal yet powerful syntax, allowing code to be treated as data and data as code seamlessly. It fosters an unparalleled level of metaprogramming capabilities, enabling developers to write code that writes code, unlocking a realm of abstractions and transformations that are challenging or impossible in other languages. Yes, very challenging, see the examples of using Hyperfiddle/Electric, here's one: [SpreadSheesh! talk by Dennis Heihoff - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEt06LLQaBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEt06LLQaBY) When you say "It's one big X REPL... and it doesn't have to be Lisp", it's already conflicting because you need Lisp to have the proper REPL experience. Those non-homoiconic languages that promise a REPL don't actually provide the "real REPL" experience. Their interactive shells are more limited in comparison to the true REPL provided by Lisp dialects, where code and data are seamlessly interchangeable. upd: darn, I guess I didn't scroll too far, all the people complaining about Lisp are at the bottom, downvoted and I guess angry because they don't understand why. It's like someone moving from China to US and complaining why everyone refuses to even try Mandarin, after all it's the most widely spoken language in the world, why wouldn't it make sense to use it instead?

School-Cotton 2y ago
Do you have a concrete example of something you can do in a lisp repl like emacs that would be impossible to build into a python repl?
- iLemming 2y ago
  > Do you have a concrete example of something you can do in a lisp repl like emacs that would be impossible to build into a python repl? This is a challenging question, it's difficult to answer in a short few sentences. One practical example that immediately comes to mind is the advising system of Emacs, where you can modify specific parts of any given function, which isn't easily achievable with Python. In a Lisp REPL, you can modify the behavior of the REPL itself on the fly, e.g. advising it to print the execution time of each expression sent to the REPL. The homoiconic nature of Lisp allows us to treat the REPL's evaluation function as data, modify it, and immediately see the results. This level of runtime modification of language constructs is not possible in Python's REPL. You can get very specific and start challenging that statement. We can talk about bytecode execution, and how you'd need to modify the bytecode at runtime or alter the interpreter's execution loop, or Python's function object structure, or method resolution order. We can talk about descriptor protocol which handles method binding, we can speculate about JIT complications, thread safety, garbage collection, etc. At the end, it all boils down to homoiconicity. The homoiconic nature of Lisp - Code As Data, Uniform representation, Meta-circular Evaluator, etc., all that makes the difference for the things that aren't realistically achievable in non-Lisp languages. That opens up many interesting practical possibilities, like creating interesting DSLs with minimal syntactic overhead and runtime efficiency. People love their favorite programming languages for their specific features. They get used to them, it's a matter of familiarity, they get attached to their language of choice. Almost every language book offers you some unprecedented magic with their language. And often programmers look at Lisp as just another programming language, missing the main point about Lisp, which is not one concrete language implementation but the idea as a whole. Learning Lisp offers something fundamentally different. It's not just about acquiring a new syntax or set of features, but about gaining a new perspective on programming itself. Lisp provides insights into the nature of code and computation that are hard to fully grasp in other languages. The benefit of learning Lisp isn't necessarily in using it for every project, but in how it reshapes your thinking about programming. It can make you a better programmer in any language by deepening your understanding of abstraction, metaprogramming, and the relationship between code and data. Many concepts that originated in Lisp have influenced modern languages. Understanding Lisp can help you appreciate and more effectively use features in other languages that were inspired by Lisp, and that is a pretty much every PL in the TIOBE list.

School-Cotton 2y ago

Do you have a concrete example of something you can do in a lisp repl like emacs that would be impossible to build into a python repl?

iLemming 2y ago
> Do you have a concrete example of something you can do in a lisp repl like emacs that would be impossible to build into a python repl? This is a challenging question, it's difficult to answer in a short few sentences. One practical example that immediately comes to mind is the advising system of Emacs, where you can modify specific parts of any given function, which isn't easily achievable with Python. In a Lisp REPL, you can modify the behavior of the REPL itself on the fly, e.g. advising it to print the execution time of each expression sent to the REPL. The homoiconic nature of Lisp allows us to treat the REPL's evaluation function as data, modify it, and immediately see the results. This level of runtime modification of language constructs is not possible in Python's REPL. You can get very specific and start challenging that statement. We can talk about bytecode execution, and how you'd need to modify the bytecode at runtime or alter the interpreter's execution loop, or Python's function object structure, or method resolution order. We can talk about descriptor protocol which handles method binding, we can speculate about JIT complications, thread safety, garbage collection, etc. At the end, it all boils down to homoiconicity. The homoiconic nature of Lisp - Code As Data, Uniform representation, Meta-circular Evaluator, etc., all that makes the difference for the things that aren't realistically achievable in non-Lisp languages. That opens up many interesting practical possibilities, like creating interesting DSLs with minimal syntactic overhead and runtime efficiency. People love their favorite programming languages for their specific features. They get used to them, it's a matter of familiarity, they get attached to their language of choice. Almost every language book offers you some unprecedented magic with their language. And often programmers look at Lisp as just another programming language, missing the main point about Lisp, which is not one concrete language implementation but the idea as a whole. Learning Lisp offers something fundamentally different. It's not just about acquiring a new syntax or set of features, but about gaining a new perspective on programming itself. Lisp provides insights into the nature of code and computation that are hard to fully grasp in other languages. The benefit of learning Lisp isn't necessarily in using it for every project, but in how it reshapes your thinking about programming. It can make you a better programmer in any language by deepening your understanding of abstraction, metaprogramming, and the relationship between code and data. Many concepts that originated in Lisp have influenced modern languages. Understanding Lisp can help you appreciate and more effectively use features in other languages that were inspired by Lisp, and that is a pretty much every PL in the TIOBE list.